It was three years ago this March morning that I woke up to sunlight streaming into my bedroom window with little Aoife, swaddled snugly in her little, blue-and-white flowered blanket, tucked tidily into the bed between us. I remember watching her and Greg sleep, both of their faces were turned towards mine, and just breathing deeply. Everything seemed so calm, so calm. She was healthy. I was healthy, and I felt so fit and well having had such an effortless birth. I could manouver myself with ease and the anxiety that had hung over me like a dismal grey cloud upon bringing Liam home was not there; over the past two years I had gained trust again, trust in myself as a person capable of sustaining life, I knew I could do it.

I remember also a morning in May, it was the 15th, and I woke up on that day to sunlight streaming in a different window. On that day I was flattened, I was mashed. I had nothing left of me to speak of. I was downstairs, on the pullout couch, claiming that I was too sore to climb the stairs. In truth I could not bear to see the door to the little room that was supposed to be hers, so I stayed down there on the pullout for almost a week until I could summon up the courage to face what lay beyond the closed door. And that morning the sun streamed on my sleeping husband's face, and I picked up a notebook that was half filled with his French assignments and I wrote the first thing I had ever written that meant something to me. It was a beginning in many ways.

And back again, it is not even three years later, and my second sweet child is in my room, having been dressed by his grandparents, and he is so eager to see his new sister, to kiss her and love her and to be loved by me. I remember the slight terror that he would squash her, and then the overwhelming miracle of having not just one, but two of them there with me. Could it really be?

I still wonder.