My daughter was six weeks old when I took her for a check up with a health nurse at the hospital where she was born. I was really struggling mentally postpartum. Whenever I looked into my child’s eyes I felt like bursting into tears. I was also so busy with my two year old toddler that my baby was just going through the life motions with me. There was very little joy for me in the monotony of motherhood.

The health nurse had the rosiest cheeks and brightest blue eyes I have ever seen. She looked like the cartoon character of a lovely happy dumpling of a woman. Golden hair curled around her temples and her hands were soft as they caressed my baby’s feet. She crooned at her, cooed at her, and began to talk.

I watched her talk to my baby, and I was mesmerised. My soul cracked in two as she told this six week old baby all about her big brother who loved her and used to do everything with and for her, and how she cried buckets when he moved away, and how she visits him often and he now has grandkids and so does she but their bond is strong, and how my baby will also have a strong bond with her big brother.

Oh and look at your big bright eyes! Look how they take me in, you’ve got stories to tell you do! You’re going to be a talker, and charm the socks off your lovely mama aren’t you! Oh you’re full of stories! Your eyes are brimming with them, they’ll spill out of you soon enough, oh they will! You’ll be the light and life of your family you will, I can see it in your big beautiful eyes. You’re full of stories to tell. Tell me darling, tell me all of them!

My baby’s eyes never left the nurse’s face, bright and eager and sure enough, goosebumps rose on my body, her gorgeous precious eyes were indeed full of stories.

My own eyes brimmed with tears which I furiously attempted to blink away lest the nurse see me. An enormous lump in my throat, painful and unmoving.

For six weeks I had looked into my daughter’s face and not seen her. I didn’t see her. I didn’t bond with her. But that day when the nurse spoke to her for ten minutes, really saw her, I saw her too. I saw my Layla, her beautiful, happy, blossoming, sunshine self.

I saw that nurse today when I went back to the hospital for an appointment for my son. Layla had found a toy trolley in the play area and she walked right past that nurse who SAW her three years ago. Right past her. And the nurse was sitting on a chair, oblivious, watching a baby who had been left in its seat while its mother took the older child out to the bathroom. The nurse sat cooing at that baby the same way she cooed at mine three years ago. Looking at her. Seeing her.

I wanted to badly to get up and go to her.

But what would I say?

Thank you for opening my eyes to the love in my child three years ago? Thank you for being a beacon of light in one of my darkest times, without even knowing it? Thank you because whenever my daughter ignites the world around her with her fire and sunshine, I think of you, because you helped me see her? You don’t know how you put out a hand and pulled me up and into the air. She didn’t known then, she doesn’t know now.

I think of her and that day a lot. It was a blip in her day. A day of seeing tens of babies, probably. A blink in her week, forgotten in an hour. But it was a lifetime to me. A lifetime of lifelines.

But how would I tell her this?!