Thoughts to my unborn

Let me get something straight. I don't believe you're really in there.

At least, perhaps I can't let myself.

There have been numerous times over the past 10 weeks that I have wondered if I am, in fact, pregnant. Despite having symptoms showering themselves upon me in gay abandon - sore, aching and rapidly expanding breasts, constant sickness, a 'thickening' of the waist (as so many articles and books delicately put it), exhaustion, and an emotional instability like a 30ft high badly constructed giant Jenga. There has always been that wondering, that doubt.

Now, I am fairly convinced I am. Finally. But trying to equate pregnancy to the growth of a foetus, you, is just something I am struggling to join up the wayward dots to (they'd rather conclude with a badly constructed image of just a hormonal, irrational, bloated and poorly WebStress - end of).

This week, you are the size of a lipstick case, with the ability to kick, swallow and move. I have been reading about your growth constantly, but I am struggling to equate it to my own rapid changes.

I have been thinking about writing to you for some time. I don't think about you much, which is a funny thing to say. But I don't. I think about being pregnant. I think about the sickness, the exhaustion, the inability to multitask, or even singletask, effectively.

It is strange that I should feel so lonely, with another whole person growing within me. Someone experiencing everything I think, say, feel or do. Someone who was there in the night when I couldn't sleep, someone who has felt my tears, who has already met some of my dearest loved ones. You have already been with me across the country. You have already had Newf nuzzling up to you (and slobbering on the material just inches away from where you are stretching your cells and multiplying your size).

My sister told me that one of her friends became incredibly introspective, in a joyous way. She rose above issues and problems, everything passing under her without consequence. The only thing that mattered was her growing child within her.

I am two weeks away from the end of my first trimester. You will double in size over the next few weeks.

I am protecting myself, I know. I am terrified that I will lose you, this tiny thing that I don't even believe I have. It is like belief, I have no other proof, I have not seen or felt your physical existence, apart from your repercussions on my body. But, unlike a normal belief, I am terrified of believing too much. Just in case.

I have my scan, hopefully, in two weeks. Then I should see you - then belief may become a solid, tangible thing. I desperately want to believe in you, to indulge in you.

I protect you, fiercely. You would have thought it funny to see me the other day out walking with your father, and I turned away from a group of lads playing football, just in case a ball were to hit me, you. You are so fragile, so delicate, yet seemingly so impossible to please and so all-consuming.

Your father is working for you in London at the moment. Father is a word for books, for literature really, dad sounding somewhat childish oddly in a novel.

Your dad I should say, for I can't imagine you ever calling him father unless you absorb some sort of misplaced public school education throughout your early childhood. He adores you. He has visions of you, a genderless image, but his, all his, holding his hand so tightly, splashing in the sea, in the bath, you will be a water baby in every sense of the word (and at your birth, perhaps...?). You will adore him, I know. And he will adore you more than he has ever loved anything, even me.

I understand that, I understand he will be consumed by you. That is a strange feeling. Maybe if I didn't know I was to be too, it would be different. But I have no choice, he has no choice, we will become your slaves.

He told me yesterday he can stay in London until the summer, so that we have enough money for when you arrive, so that I don't have to work. I didn't have the heart to tell him I wouldn't be able to work, but I knew what he meant. I felt a pang of selfishness, as if already you were demanding his love, his time, his attention more than me. As if you were more important, your birth and the time after more important than me, now.

He would be absent for most of my pregnancy. I know that importance does not feature and he is so homesick and aching for me, for our life, but my emotions spike me angrily, a surge of sharp, cutting, isolated attacks that I loathe but that I allow myself to indulge, to weak to rationalise. I face a long six months.

We have not agreed to anything yet, but how can we not. He left his job in November, for us to start a business. We chose to conceive, we had discussed it for such a long time. Were we terribly naive in the assumption that we wouldn't need such a vast injection of cash, that we weren't going to be in the financial stability we would have longed to be in, that both of us working freelance together, your dad himself starting a totally new career, was a gamble that jars icily with your conception, your birth? Or were we presented with an option that would make everything easier, in that holy grail, that distant reward, of The Long Term?

I am not sure it is the long term. He will continue his work, then return, perhaps not until August. Then he will be back in his old career, too dangerous, too unstable to immerse himself in a new one, in the business. And I, I am alone again, freelancing on my own. But we can only choose one path to take. We will both work so hard, we can only both do so much.

Your dad is my rock. He is everything to me. I adore him with my whole heart. I adore him and I will adore you. We will be such a loving family, I promise you.

I hope you consider my outpouring this morning to be something of a good thing, and to not scare you off, not to terrify you of an emotional, unstable, selfish mum who aches for your protection and your health and your happiness more than you will ever know, throughout the rest of your life, and asks only for your love in return.