Introducing Baby Girl

I have in my home a rare and precious thing - a tiny baby girl, complete with tiny toes and a button nose. She is perfect and beautiful and embodies so much hope and unexplored potential that you can almost see it in her eyes.

As I am writing this, she is sleeping peacefully next to me on the sofa, all vulnerable in her onesie. It is hard to imagine that, at just a few days old, she has already been through so much. Her life is already brimming with uncertainty and strife. Taken from her mother, unknown to her father, in a terrible limbo of paperwork, professional intervention and legal decision-making, she is already an untold number of unhappy statistics.

Her little chest flutters with her breath, delicate fingers curled around a soft blanket, tiny ears laid flat against a perfectly-shaped head. A little gurgle and she shifts position, perhaps getting ready to wake again, to explore the limited scope of her vision with those not-yet-brown eyes of hers.

She is likely to be one of the very few adopted before her first birthday - well before, bureaucracy permitting. Dreams come true while elsewhere, a nightmare plays out.

I have held out my arms and taken this sleeping little one from a grieving mother in a hospital room. In a few months I expect to hold out my arms again and hand her to her new family. Grief and joy. Broken and complete. Loss and gain.

Welcome to the world and to my home, Baby Girl.