Page 4 of Always Alchemy

She even brought them along to a couple of our later obstetric appointments, once we were comfortable everything was progressing well.

Now, I sit in my chair and watch as the girls flank Mads on the bed. She has her knees up, Jonny swaddled and propped in the ridge between her legs as they coo over him.

There are ends, and there are beginnings, and, although Stella and Nancy have experienced new beginnings in some form with my marriage to Mads, Jonny’s arrival into the world is the best possible proof I can give to our daughters that life is indeed a circle and not just a dead end.

I have no intention whatsoever of connecting the following dots for the girls, but it blows my mind that new life has come from the ashes of Claire’s life. That she had to die for Jonny to exist. I can’t fathom it, and I don’t want to. It’s a binary whose truth makes me uncomfortable, when I want only to celebrate today. To give thanks for the amazing humans in my life. For the palpable joy, the hope, that exists today, in this pleasant, sunny room.

One of the midwives, Susan, comes in to check on us. She’s in her fifties, with a briskly warm energy that reminds me of our nanny, Ruth. She’s been on duty since we left the labour room this morning, and she’s doing a great job of providing endless cups of tea for us. (Maddy declared earlier that her first cup of tea after giving birth was the best thing she’d ever tasted in her life, a fact I don’t doubt.)

‘How are we all doing?’ Susan asks cheerily. ‘Ooh, you must be Jonny’s big sisters! Isn’t he a lucky boy?’

Maddy gives her a huge grin. I suspect her warmth towards Susan is a combination of feel-good hormones and that natural human instinct to gravitate towards people who seem to know what they’re doing in situations when you yourself feel like you’ve entered a parallel universe.

‘Indeed he is,’ she says. ‘This is Stella and Nancy, and they’ve come to meet their baby brother.’

Susan beams. ‘Isn’t that lovely? Stella and Nancy—what beautiful names. Are there any biscuit-eaters among you?’

Nancy opens her mouth to deliver a vehement affirmative, but she’s interrupted by a shrill, tinny ringtone coming from the depths of Susan’s apron.

Holy fuckingshit.

The tune?

I Want it That Wayby The Backstreet Boys.

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TEA AND TRUTHBOMBS

BELLE

When Rosalie was born four months ago, Aida sent me a card in which she had written the following:

The days are long, but the years are short. Enjoy your newborn baby. X

At the time, I suspected that this was a card only a mother would or could pick out.

Now I know it to be true.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt a sentiment so deeply, not sure anything has ever felt more perfectly, irrefutably bittersweet than this conflict. It carves itself onto my heart and alters my DNA: this constant, low-level panic that, while I’m celebrating and obsessing over every tiny milestone Rosalie gives us—and, admittedly, wishing away some of the harder days—every second with her is time we’ll never get back, aslost forever as that old cliché of sand slipping through our fingers.

There are days when I think bedtime—hers and ours—will never come.

There are nights when I’ve been desperate, feral, to see the dawn break. (Next time, there’s no way I’m having a winter baby.)

And still, as Maddy and I line Rosalie up on the sofa next to two-day-old Jonny, I see how vastly my sweet girl has grown. I have a horrible reference point: Jonny is how a new baby looks, and at sixteen weeks old, that’s no longer Rosalie. She’s double his size.

My best friend’s perfect, brand-new baby boy is effectively holding up a mirror to precious days and weeks that have slipped away forever.

I swear, I feel Aida’s advice in my very bones today. It’s a clawing sense of panic, a weird grief that every new day and every fresh skill my incredible little daughter learns comes at the expense of something lost.

I suspect that if I confessed as much to anyone who has kids, they’d laugh sympathetically and shrug and say,Welcome to parenthood.

Despite all this, it’s a happy day, too. The happiest. Because I’m hanging at my friend’s house, my best friend since I waseleven,and we’ve done this a million times in the past, but now we both have doting husbands and, in Maddy’s case, lovely stepdaughters, and tiny, precious babies, and that’s really incredible, when you think about it.

We both snap some pictures with our phones, because these two are ridiculously sweet. Rosalie is alert, gazing around the room with her huge eyes that have, over the past fortnight, begun to shift from blue to that green-hazel-gold mix that Dex and I both inherited from Mum. Jonny is stillasleep, swaddled like a tiny dark-haired burrito, his rosebud mouth doing that little pursing thing that makes me glad I’m wearing breast pads, even though he’s not my baby.

‘I can’t wait till he can smile,’ Mads says, picking him up carefully and depositing him in his rocking crib in the middle of the den. As she does, Norm, her family’s lovely black Lab, trots over and lies down right beside the crib, his glossy black head on his paws.

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