My own experience of holding, does not relate to my own children, but rather to my nieces. I don’t have children of my own. Though I would dearly have loved to, life just hasn’t unfolded for me that way.
My holding experience/s have emerged through the relationships I have with my three nieces now 10, 7 and 2 years of age.
I remember cradling each of them as infants and feeling very aware of their smallness. In those first few weeks when I visited “to have a hold” they mostly slept. But when they woke and looked around with their blue, coudy eyes, I wondered if they knew from my smell, that I wasn’t their mother. I remembered reading that babies identify their mother through smell, before their eye sight is strong enough to recognise faces.
I admit that initially there was a sadness in the fact that I wasn’t their mother (“a mother”). But, as I rocked each of my nieces gently I told myself, that there was something potentially precious in being their Aunty.
For some reason, my holding experiences most vividly relate to the eldest of my nieces. She and I both delight in the fact that I was the first one, outside of her parents, to see and hold her in hospital. She likes me re-telling her the story of creeping into the ward barely 10 hours after her birth, finding her wrapped up snuggly, like a rose bud in a cot beside her mother. While my brother and sister in law looked on exhausted, I knew in my heart that I wanted to foster a special bond with this little girl.
A few months on, I babysat her one evening – during her parent’s first night out, post baby. Partly to my disappointment, she was already asleep when I arrived. I had secretly hoped I might have some time with her whilst she was awake, to take in the way she’s grown and changed since my last visit. Every twenty minutes or so, I’d creep into her room, listening to her breath. She looked so peaceful, curled up one end of the bed. Two or three hours into the night, I heard a tiny cry and crept down the stairs, and looked in to see her staring up at me. I could see that she was slightly surprised to see that it wasn’t her mother or father looking down at her, but someone different; not a complete stranger, but not who she was expecting to see. I held my breath, waiting for further reaction.
And then tentatively she smiled, and did a little kick of her legs inside her sleeping bag.
Something like joy flooded through me as I reached down and collected her up in my arms. Not yet old enough to hold her head up for long, she nestled into my neck. I sat with her, in the rocking chair and gently tapped her back. I could feel her steady heartbeat. She was very still in my arms for several minutes, as we sat there together in the milky moonlight drifting through a gap in the curtains. And then all of a sudden, she sat upright, taking me in again. Then just as quickly, she relaxed back into my neck. I could feel her body ease as she fell asleep.
She felt safe with me. And I felt safe with her. There was a beautiful certainty in that moment of mutual holding.
Ten years on, my eldest niece, is up to my shoulders now. She is like me in many ways; an observer and a thinker. She likes to “take in”. She likes to listen. We are a little bit like puzzles pieces – she likes to cuddle up on the couch, or sit on my lap. Sometimes we talk, other times we don’t.
There is a natural ease in our closeness, our likeness. I hope that this is something that will always remain.
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