Acrylic on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

Seamus and I are done having children. Well, that’s the plan. We always say if we were to have a fourth we would want another boy. We love being boy parents. We wouldn’t change it. We wouldn’t have another to ‘try for a girl…’

But we have these little moments like this week - selling the cot that our youngest has decided he no longer wants to be contained in. Like giving away the last of my maternity clothes and baby blankets…and we wonder what a daughter might have looked like? Would we have named her Winifred or Clementine or Daisy May or Posy or Polly or Yvonne or Mathilda?

In life there are always ‘what ifs’ and with every choice we make there are other choices that get cancelled out or that we choose not to make. Little glimmers of other versions of ourselves that might have lived these parallel lives with different choices sometimes sparkle at the edges of our vision. They can look a lot like regret or relief or sadness…and when they do, it’s ok to feel those things at the same time as feeling joy, satisfaction, contentment, certainty in the choices you did make. You’re allowed to feel both. Life is always both.