Who Is This?

My daughter-in-law is due to give birth to a baby tomorrow.

There have been lots of babies in our lives. To someone like me, who hasn’t ever and never will carry the growing WEIGHT of A Life inside of me, it can become easy to get laid-back about all of that.

But the heavy truth is this:

Arriving Soon - a gift to the world that will take up to a century, perhaps, to reveal everything about itself. Many decades to demonstrate all of its incredible potential.

A gift that will daily be full of surprises for us.

And even more full of surprises for him or herself.

Who is this? Who could they become?

Those are the questions we can ask.

Because in a dark, warm place right now, rests a body that is fully formed and ready to enter the light. Ready to meet the woman who has carried all of the weight, and the family whose lives they have become gradually aware of, like silhouettes on a stage behind a curtain.

And deep inside an already sizeable brain, conscious of its surroundings but not too much else, a particular question will slowly start to emerge:

”Who am I? Who am I becoming?”