I was talking with a friend recently about how I don’t engage with thinking along the lines of ‘my daughter should be 1 year old’ or ‘we wouldn’t be doing this if she hadn’t died’. In the very early days sure, the word and thought popped into mind and many people around me said it but I realised I found it incredibly distressing. When I felt that ‘should’ feeling it was like another loss and also really associated with failure or unfairness for me. In fact there were elements of my daughter passing away at a young age that have actually been sacred and beautiful experiences, should I not have experienced those? I’d swap them without a moments thought, but refining where the word ‘should’ holds weight in my life has been very freeing and something I realised maybe wasn’t all that relatable unless you’ve lived it.

I don’t believe that it was ‘for the best’ or ‘meant to be’ that my newborn baby passed away so suddenly, but I do believe there is an element of a plan about life. We are all going to die and we don’t know when, those are facts that many try to avoid thinking about unless faced with the situation. No one could possibly tell me with a surety that Astrid ‘should’ still be here physically unless they can see behind corners and can also predict what would happen tomorrow. This is where the lines of ‘should’ and ‘want’ become blurred. We absolutely want everyone to be here for as long as they can be. I do believe that while I don’t doubt my girl would have done wonderful things had she grown up here, she completed her purpose. Part of my purpose, our purpose is to see that and accept that we simply don’t get to call the shots.

I want my girl to still be here with us, but emphasising that she ‘should’ be doesn’t help me to accept the reality that I get to learn to mother her in a different way to what I expected. Every attempt at bringing a child into the world is a gamble, one with often great odds, but not having a one year old at home is not a failure of that. ‘Should’ emplies that the outcome was a failure. My daughter’s life, my Motherhood and our family is not a failure. It may have an outcome that isn’t what we envisioned, but mothering a daughter in this way is a beautiful and hard experience, much like traditional motherhood can be. It is a complex relationship and never looks the same outside as it is in reality.

Maintaining the narrative of what ‘should’ be only prevents the acceptance of a complex, beautiful reality. One where I still absolutely wish my girl were able to be here but early acceptance has only given me opportunities to embrace my daughter in this new version of our family. Not accepting the life I am in now only stops me bringing my daughter along with our world. We can involve her in it all, that doesn’t look like the way I imagined but it’s not all or nothing. Make no mistake in seeing that I wish more than anything she were toddling alongside me now, but I am making the most of all the experiences I get to do because of her life, despite that longing.