How to keep remembering what is truly important to me? I grasp the answer in my fingers and think my grip is firm and then before I know it I look and find my hand empty and days and months have passed me by. Why is it really so hard to keep my grip on that? What really happens for it to slip through the web of my fingers, sand in the hour-glass, and my life needing to be inverted once again just to get back to where I was.

In a moment of calm, I remember to sit down, to light a candle and catch my breath and in that peace all the knowing of what’s important comes back in line with me. I breathe and smile, “of course”, my happy heart sings out. I start to write a list to capture what must be done to prioritise this knowing; and, without my noticing, the sand begins again its slippery descent.

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My heart sighed when she said she felt unwell. We both knew she wasn’t really and yet I also instinctively knew that, despite the call of my tax returns being due, she needed a break from school that day. We made an agreement: no school and Mummy needed to do her accounts.

I’m kneeling on the floor of my home office, back aching, receipts and banks statements strewn across every corner of the floor. I breathe heavily and look up. She is quietly standing in the doorway in a floor length blue party dress that used to belong to her sister, with a white fur stole around her shoulders and a bow tied in her hair. She silently passes me an envelope that is neatly inscribed in perfect purple handwriting “Best Mummy in the World” and mysteriously leaves the room.

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I crept into my daughters’ darkened room this morning, two sleeping lumps in their shared double bed, mouths open, limbs strewn wide, bed covers thrown off. For a moment I hesitated to wake them up, enjoying the sweetness of that moment, all the years of mother love wrapped into that tender image. I lowered my body onto the bed in the space between their bodies, enjoying the warmth of their limbs and the tickle of their hair in my face. My eldest opened her eyes, scrunched her freckled face at me and closed her eyes again. How easy it is to love them in this space between worlds.

I lean over to Hannah, the baby of the family, she opens her eyes and gives me a wide mouthed smile and I exclaim in delight. A gap where last night a tooth had dangled, greets us this foggy morning. “Where’s your tooth?” I cry out and both girls sit bolt upright in the excitement of this new loss. We all start laughing, yesterday had been shadowed by Hannah’s deep frustration that the tooth would not fall. We had all had a go at tugging, played numerous games of “Dentist” and yet the protruding little nugget had refused to let itself go. And then, with no efforting at all, it had slipped away to make room for the new.

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