Nancy

I hold them in the palm of one hand. A tiny pair of blue denim trainers with neat Velcro straps and white trim. Quite fashionable still really, a good 20 years on– the one and only item of baby clothing I allowed myself to buy.

Except they are so much more than mere trainers. As I look at them, I am taken into another world. A world of what might have been, filled with hope, with potential, with fruition. And I can only wonder – what chubby little feet would have filled these shoes?My heart is wrenched from my chest and pulled away down a seemingly unending road towards a light that never gets nearer.

This is longing – so much a part of me now that it is impossible to split it away from the person I’ve become. It is woven into me – deep, at a cellular level. I wonder what it would be like not to feel like this, and I simply can’t imagine it. To yearn for what I can never have is to walk every day in shadow, as if the brightest of lights had been lit just for a moment before being snuffed out forever. I wake in the dark, I work in the dark and, yes, I laugh in the dark. There is always darkness.

But in the trainers there is light. The light of what so nearly was. They walk me into a different world where longing has no place.

Odd isn’t it – how we can long for something that we know nothing of? ‘Be careful what you wish for’, they say. And maybe they’re right. Maybe it would have been nothing like I imagined –motherhood. Maybe the rosy world I long for is rooted in idealism, and the role of mother would have worn me down and worn me out. Maybe I would have regretted every moment.

And yet the deepest depths of me scream otherwise. I long for my child as a bee longs for the flower, as the stars long for the sky. Because together there is completeness. A natural order. A rightness. Put simply…it’s home.

Apart, there is only emptiness and, even now, disbelief. And so the longing goes on...