The end of a journey

Yesterday, your 5 year Talipes journey ended (apart from a few stretches to do each day). After being cast from your toes to your thigh for the first 4 weeks of your life, to wearing a brace keeping your feet shoulder width apart with a metal bar for 23 hours a day for the next 3 months of your life, to wearing it at night times for the next 4 and a half years, this journey has been your whole little life. As I sit here today, that period of time has been your entire life. I know I've already said that! You couldn't sleep on your side, curl up in a ball, feel your duvet on your feet or get up in the morning. And now you can.

Waiting to be seen in hospital yesterday

I am not going to wax lyrical about how brave you were. Or how unfair it was. Or how strong you've been. I never have. The treatment was brilliant. It didn't hurt. We treated it as part of your life. Your routine. You knew no different and so you never questioned it. What I will do now is celebrate with you that you can now curl up in a ball, feel your duvet on your little feet and get up on your own in the morning and that, my darling, is something worth celebrating. Treasure the little things.

No more boots and bar

The memory I will treasure is you, my little 5 year old girl, walking barefoot along the clinical corridor of the hospital so that they could assess your walking. Your pale little feet on that big cold hospital corridor floor. They looked so vulnerable and I willed everything to be ok until I nearly burst inside. I wanted to hold you forever at that moment. 

And that's it. I started writing these letters to talk to you about your Talipes and they have become so much more than that and given me more joy than I can ever describe to you here. I hope, with all my heart, that you will enjoy them when you're older. Until the next time I write sweetheart, sleep tight, curled up in your little ball x

 

Homeward bound

We got stuck in traffic on the way home today. Despite my best efforts on the car game front you fell asleep in your little chair with Right Bunny pushed up against your cheek.

Sitting on that road, with you in the back, I felt nostalgic. Heading back. Is home this way, or that? 

The A11 is the road in and out of Norfolk. It's been my route on holiday as a very little girl. And the route we came home again on. The road I took when we left Norfolk. The road I travel back down to see our friends and family. And the road that brings them to me. It is just a road but it's more than a road, to me. It takes me 'home' to my house. And it takes me back 'home' to my memories. 

This view has been the backdrop to so many of my journeys.

When I first made my journeys down this road, I didn't have you. Now you come too. I watched you in my mirror today, gazing out at the same views I have gazed at since I was your age. Norfolk is already staking it's claim over part of your being, as it has to mine. Your cousins are there, nanas, grandads, aunties, uncles and some of our very closest friends. "Your park from when you were little Mummy" is somewhere you ask to go to often. I carry this place in my words and actions and hopes and fears. It's engrained in me. Somewhere that means so much to me won't fail to be important to you. It just can't. 

We listened to this on the way home tonight. Sleep tight sweetie. 

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever gonna make it home again. It's so far and out of sight" ~ Carole King, Home Again (1971)