My baby. My beautiful baby girl.
How did we arrive here?
How is it that I find myself buying a gold, foil number 8 balloon and watch you with your bouncy bunches skip off to school chatting excitedly with your sister and your mates?
It’s mere minutes since your daddy and I brought you home in your car seat and lost hours marvelling at your tiny fingers and toes and beautiful bow lips.
Bethan, my darling, I loved you before you existed. I loved you as a bump and as a wincy wee. I have loved you every minute of every day since your inception and I will do until my last breath and then again from wherever I go next.
That doesn’t make me a perfect parent and it doesn’t make you a perfect child. Perfection is a myth so just be real. You aren’t bothered a jot about what you wear, the way you look or what others think. Cling on to that Kid- it’s gold dust.
You are you with your abstract imagination, your love of colouring and Lego and reading and Harry Potter. I am me with my baffling brain, my love of learning and literature, my permanent need for a fluffy bed sock and a brew. We are we with our books and our blankies and our Bake Off and we are all the better when we are doing all of that or anything else as a four; Team Leary 😊
Bethan- you have more gifts than I care to count and more will reveal themselves to you and to me and to the world as you grow. Thank you for your gentle nature, your whimsical way of seeing the world. Thanks for your jokes, your patience with your sister and your cousins. Thanks for your zest for life, your efforts at parkrun and cricket and at everything!
Sometimes aloof, sometimes breath takingly empathic. Thanks for noticing when I’m a little fraught and for speaking to me gently as though you’re the adult.
You blow my mind. You always have.
There will come a time when I don’t have the privilege of seeing and being in your life so much as I am now- you might travel, you might take a path that I don’t totally get and, that is just as it should be but, know this my love, that decision is yours. Me and your daddy will be here, in as much of your life as you want and need forever.
Happy Birthday Bethan Gwen.
We will love you until the seas run dry.
And that will never happen.
Love Muma.
XxxX
PS- Just in case you are reading this years from now, your 8th birthday was a weird and wild time politically… look it up! WOWZER.
