THE UN-BIRTHDAY: CELEBRATING THE BIRTHDAY OF THE CHILD YOU HAVEN’T MET

I use affiliate links in some blog posts. If you click through and make a purchase, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to yourself. Thank you for your support.

I wrote the following nearly two years ago, on the occasion of our twins’ first birthday.

Today, our twins turn one. I haven’t yet met them, but I love them already.

We need to celebrate – and yet how does one celebrate the birthday of someone they’ve never met? Someone who is already so firmly locked inside one’s heart, but so achingly distant?

Perhaps our celebrations looked a little odd from the outside. But I think that those who, each year, mark the birthday of a child they never met, a child born asleep or taken too soon – maybe they can understand our need to celebrate.

We did some of the usual traditions. There were balloons, cake and candles, and homemade cards. Missy didn’t struggle to create a card for each of her new little brothers.

But, lacking the no-nonsense self-confidence of a 4-year-old, I stared at my blank card last night and I was stuck. Making a homemade card for each of my children’s birthdays is a tradition so firmly imprinted into the DNA of our family that I couldn’t do anything else – yet how do you make a card for someone you’ve never met?

I settled on a generic caterpillar design, suitable for a first birthday. Twins, please forgive me – I don’t yet know your characters, your traits, your gifts and your passions. Next year will be different.

We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ – to each twin, individually, marking the start of an upbringing which will firmly recognise each of them as separate, unique entities. But it was our birth kids who blew out the candles, it was they who were in the photos. Next year will be different.

There were no presents. The twins are coming into a home already bulging with entertainment and activity and, besides, there will be moving-in presents and Christmas presents. Their birthday presents were the cots, drawers, shelves, clothes and nappies I’m rapidly sourcing from eBay and Gumtree. Next year will be different.

There was no measuring on the height chart. We have a permanent record of how tall each of our birth children were on their first birthday – but, for the twins, we will have to be content to measure them two months late. Next year will be different.

There was no party – not at our house anyway – because how can you party without the guests of honour being there? Instead, they celebrated at their foster home, and their brilliant foster mum deserved every minute of this joyful day with them. She has been the one to feed them, nurture them, love them through their first year. Next year will be different.

For me, there were no nostalgic reminisces, no casting my mind back to the first twinges, the contractions, the labour, the birth, the early minutes and hours. I have no idea what I was doing one year ago today. Next year this won’t be any different.

Nor will it be next year, or the year after, or the year after that.

I will never have this date indelibly etched into my memory because, at the time, I had no awareness of the significance of it, no idea that our family had just changed forever.

But I think of her.

And I wonder how many hours she laboured, and how she felt, and what she was thinking, and if she had anyone by her side. And I like to remember my joy when each of my birth children screamed their way into this world, and imagine her feeling this about her birth children, giddy in love with them like I was with mine.

They are our twins. But they are hers as well. Today we celebrate the three of them.