It’s been three weeks since Marysia was born. Her name is Maria but we call her Marysia, Maryś, Marynia and sometimes Mania. Also : “Robak” (Polish for worm) and a thousand other affectionate nicknames which come to mind in the wee hours of the morning and stick regardless of whether they seem fitting later on in the day.

I thought I won’t have time to blog at all and then I wrote the previous post while half asleep in my bed at night. I needed to do something for myself and writing was it. Strangely. I shared snippets of our lives on Instagram but writing a longer form perhaps will be more therapeutic and will help me to collect my thoughts for the future. Will she ever read them? Since there is this option I better make sure I write with her in mind. Just like everything else I do now and probably I will the foreseeable future, her at the centre of everything. One of the other nicknames I call her is “my Sun” (Polish: słoneczko). No surprises there.

I do feel like I’m writing from the other side of my life. Life so new and different to the one I had before baby that I hardly recognise it sometimes. This newness used to be terrifying for me, who knew I was such a creature of habit. Or perhaps the reality was too distorted by sleep deprivation and tiredness to discover that it was still me in the mirror, still my partner softly snoring on a pillow next to my head, still the same room I used to read in and sleep for longer than 2h at a time.

It’s around 3 am now, perhaps a bit later. I can hear people coming back home from wherever the night took them under my bedroom window. She buries her face into my breast, then jerks her head back and lies her warm cheek on top of it. Tiny fist, soft snores and regular milky breaths. She doesn’t sleep that well anywhere else. It’s so strange to think that to her I’ve always been this new me, she doesn’t know me from before she made it to this world. With her everything is new. For me it will just take some time to get used to this newness but as far as she’s concerned, that’s all she’s ever known. I’m her mother, the warm breast she can safely bury her face in and fall asleep. Not a bad thing to have become. It’s still me.