Seeing your child for the first time is rarest of occasions. You see glimpses of yourself from the past. The potential of a brand new life happening right before your eyes. And most importantly, that life begins again.

when your child is born, you know that of all the lives you might have lived, only this one was ever really possible.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

Sometimes it was something like the birth of a new child in the home. Sometimes it was illness of a child.

Now the thing about having a baby - and I can't be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter you have it.