Every now and again I allow myself to daydream about what I would be like as a mother. I try not to imagine too many day to day specifics because living through what I desperately want is very painful. Instead, I think about if I would be relaxed or worried about feeding? Would my reading in pregnancy about sleep and attachment go out of the window when sleep deprivation set in? All those kinds of things that I knew would be hard but also couldn’t wait for.

I know that I will never really know the impact Astrid has had on me, in my role as a mother, as her mother, because it can’t ever be quantified or looked at in isolation. What I can control is my perspective and I found myself saying to people that I’m trying to live as if she were still here. To a non-bereaved parent that may well sound unhinged. What I don’t mean by that is living in denial or some kind of alternate reality where she is still in hospital (eventhough on some days that is where my brain goes and I think that is okay).

What I mean by living as if she is still here means living with the impact of her life being because of her birth, her existence, rather than being influenced by her passing or physical absence. I try to live in a way that recognises and honours her presence as our daughter. Our first child, the first we got to hold and nurture.

Holding onto her life is what families have done since they existed, honouring those that have gone before, through habits and traditions. I think often of how my late Father in Law would respond to something or what he would do, even when we do a project in the house I ‘bring him along’ in my mind, to make sure we buy the right things from B&Q.

The same is with our little girl, we can keep her influence on us. With a baby, I find that to be very different. So many share their platitudes that ‘Heaven needed another Angel’, ‘she had important work to do in Heaven’ or that ‘she was simply too perfect’. I understand the comfort that brings to others as it provides a reason, a fairly superficial one, to them. To me, our girl’s existence reaches far beyond being another perfect soul. Her presence is eternal and deep reaching, everything I do now is influenced by her, and because she was here, not because she no longer is.

It is part of our family that she was here for a short time, making that a ‘nice’ thing doesn’t honour the vital role that a short transition from presence to absence brings. That in itself brings meaning. I didn’t get much of a chance to reflect on how I was changed as a mother during Astrid’s life, so much of that has come since she passed. I do know that I will try and live in the sunshine of her life, and not in the shadows of her death. We generally don’t live in anticipation of loss, but birth and death happens to us all, so who says we have to live in the impact of one over the other?