Forever There, Ours

“You’ve both had a few good days.”

One sentence that held so much. Holds so much it halts you, in that moment with it all. And then you take it with you.

it stopped me, it stayed with me because it was true. Hearing your truth revealed from someone else, someone close really does open you up to it, brutally at times but necessary. And I was listening.

We are in the middle of half term, just me and my five-year-old little girl, moving through slower, peaceful days with a gentle joy. The kind that used to always be our normal, the kind we’ve known since she was tiny. No resistance with mini battles or pushing boundaries, no raised voices echoing back too quickly. Just a gentle grace, a harmony between us. Our bubble of bliss

It should’ve felt natural. Once, it always had.

But somewhere along the way, that grace had stumbled. Not all at once, not in a way I could clearly name, just enough that I began to feel it missing. Finding it again, even though I knew it was still there somewhere, one of the hardest things – like a shy fawn that had been spooked once enough.

The rhythm we once had – gentle, natural, ours – had been something more fragile. Something that could falter at any moment.

So when it was said out loud “you’ve both had a few good days” it was felt, threw me open to something I knew was there but exposed to face.

Not something I allowed myself to call a win, not at first. Not yet.

There had been a time when days like that weren’t known, when a sentence as such to expose so much wouldn’t be thought because we had always had our own bubble of bliss, right from knowing she existed. We have naturally been at our best when it was just us. Effortless in a way I didn’t question then, worry I’d lost then, only lived inside.

Lately though, I had.

I’d feel myself losing it, the bubble but yes, perhaps also my sanity. Quicker to correct her, quicker to raise my voice instead of meeting her gently. Losing patience where once there had been free space. Watching something I loved begin to feel further out of reach, without fully understanding how it happened.

And with that came the quiet panic and self-condemning, that I’d done this and one wrong moment would send us further into it.

that even now, as we and our relationship was growing it was all still fragile.

Yet, these past few days, something was holding firmer, truer. Perhaps this break together came at the right time. The last break, Christmas and new year was different, hectic but in that lovely festive family way. This one was more just us, and much needed. And so it held, not perfectly, not without effort, but enough.

Enough that we moved through the days without me unravelling, without us unravelling. Enough that she answered our new game when I’d call for her – instead of it being “what” or “yeah Mam” for me to respond with an “I love you”, she played it her way to get tell me she loved me first. Enough that I met her where she wanted to be, more often than not.

Small things, big to me. Because they’d been under threat of going missing, now, they felt like something else, new, more. I was awake to them, to us and cherishing every moment, each and every one.

So not a return to what we had been, exactly – but a quiet finding our way back, together. To our reshaped bubble.

The grand victory, to me, is in our bubble, in learning how to reshape it, grow it, make it magical and stay. The smaller wins are in getting there, winning another moment another day in staying there. There won’t be a moment where it all shifts at once. There are still ones where I feel it – pulled in that flash to the edge of impatience, toward old reactions. The sense that it could all vanish If I’m careless to stumble.

but the difference now is in the noticing, in catching it sooner. Seeing it, giving myself pause and in choosing, even once to respond as who she always knew.

Then we’ve a day that holds together where another might not have.

Maybe that what the win is? Not perfection, not even grace, not entirely. Just this – knowing and trusting that something is still there, we are. That our bond hasn’t been lost, only tested. That even after the harder moments, we can still return to each other, in just as fierce of an instant.

At the end of each day, being close after she’s fallen asleep, when everything quietens, I still find myself in our gentle grace, in our little bubble of bliss. Thinking of it in a fluffy magical way to soothe a sleeping baby probably comes from and certainly takes me back to a song I would sing to her right from the very start, right to even knowing she existed as my baby bump. Not now as often but she does still ask for it, or I would sing it anyway. Perhaps every goodnight should given with it, to put its magic against any stumbles of the day and hold us steady, together ready for another morning.

“You’ve both had a few good days”. This time, I let myself hear it, next time it will be more days. And then, everyday with only the new normal of stumbles that do not threaten. Do not scare us.