For my girls

Came over all lyrical this evening! All nostalgic this week after Big Muddle's first school concert.

You grew inside me
Each tiny kick a reminder
Of the amazing potential that stirred

Then you were here
Warm and new
Lifeforce coursing through you

You were a baby
Your needs intense
Your love unfaltering

Now you grow
Every day it seems
You find another part of you

One day you will be women
The world will be yours
And tiny kicks will stir inside you

Naming Day Preparations

Now we're back from holiday, preparation has started in earnest for Baby Muddle's Naming Day.

We had a humanist naming day for Big Muddle too, when she was about the same age. It was a lovely way to welcome her to the family, without committing her to a particular faith.

This time we're holding it at home, which is great in one way but terrifying in another! Last weekend I was gardening and sewing 15m of bunting and I still have a huge 'to do' list. Caterers have been paid today (they're also hiring us chairs and the all-important tea urn) and the even-more-important wine delivery received, so that's two things down!

I'll finish with the reading I've chosen for the ceremony, written by Anne Campbell:

You are the trip I did not take
You are the pearls I could not buy
You are my blue Italian lake
You are my piece of foreign sky

You are my Honolulu Moon
You are the book I did not write
You are my heart's unuttered tune
You are a candle in my night

You are the flower beneath the snow
In my dark sky a bit of blue
Answering Disappointment's blow
With "I am happy, I have you!"

Relationships

Its a funny old business being a couple with children. You go from being each others world, to being united by your world's new centre. From being a twosome you're now a team and its how well you work together that defines the next phase of your relationship.

This can be extremely tough. It takes something particularly strong to weather the sleep deprivation, colicky screaming and parenting worries. If you're lucky though, you find yourself united in a new way, your bond redefined and solidified by becoming a family.

It draws to my mind a reading that we had at our wedding. Its an excerpt from A Gift From the Sea by Anne Lindbergh Morrow. I hope you like it.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. Its is an impossibility. It is a lie even to pretend to.

 And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.

We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror at its ebb. We are afraid it will never return.

We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense  that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. 

Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.

Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.