People sometimes ask me why I blog and I usually answer that I love the community and the commitment. But I also love the fact that over the last 5 years I have created a written record of far more than just my progress with designing and making. In the time that I have been blogging I have shared many personal events in my life and in particular I have shared and recorded my experiences as a mother to Bella (who was 5 weeks off her 1st birthday when I started) and my very difficult journey through 7 miscarriages and a horribly stressful pregnancy before I became a mother to Lily.
The girls often ask me to tell them about their birth's and I happily regale them with tales of 26 hour labours (Bella) and 3 hour labours (Lily), heads being pulled out with forceps (Bella) and heads being pulled out with vacuums (Lily) and squashed faces (Bella) and pointy heads (Lily), beautiful babies (Bella) and well, less than beautiful, but still totally loved babies (Lily - and don't worry, we all laugh about how she looked when she was born). But I rarely think about or talk about how we got here. What we went through, to have both the girls, and in particular Lily. Not because it's too painful, but because who really has time to look back that much, when the here and now is so time consuming.
Which brings me back to why I blog. Because tonight, just by chance, I found myself reading this post and was surprised when I realised that I had forgotten what Lily's pregnancy felt like and how worried I had been that I wouldn't love her enough. I had forgotten about the weekly visits to the miscarriage clinic to have a scan and (once we had established she was still viable) a weekly injection to try and maintain the pregnancy. I read the post and almost cried, because I truly remember feeling that I wouldn't cope - when we thought the pregnancy had failed, or when we were told she almost definitely had Downs Syndrome, or when I got ill and had to go in to hospital again.
And at the very point when I was remembering all that fear and anger and sadness, I heard Lily at the top of the stairs, asking to go to the toilet. And as I picked her up to carry her to the bathroom I told her that I was just reading about when she was in my tummy and how very, very lucky I am to have her.
And Lily told me that she's too big to go in my tummy now. And I told her that she never liked it much in there anyway.
And that is the reason I blog.
