Child of my Child

Child of my child, Heart of my heart

Your smile bridges the years between us
I am young again …
discovering the world through your eyes
You have the time to listen
And I have the time to spend.
Delighted to gaze at familiar loved features…
made new in you again
Through you …I’ll see the future
Through me…you’ll know the past
In the present… we’ll love one another
As long as these moments last

I have never posted about my granddaughter. Why? I do not know, but just maybe it is because my feelings for her is so deep and so strong that I am a bit jealous of sharing them, and her, with the rest of the world.

My son was only twenty, and her mother only eighteen, when she came into our lives. They have known each other for many years and it was accepted that they would get married sometime in the future. Still, the news that they were to become parents at such a young age, came as a huge shock and cause for dismay. Little did we know at the time that those feelings of dismay would turn into feelings of pure joy... Joy that this little bit of humanity would bring into our lives.

I love my own children and adored them as babies, yet it did not prepare me for the feelings that I experienced when I held her in my arms for the first time. It was quite overwhelming! Bonding was instant and this has not changed in the past seven years.

From birth she spent part of every day with us in our house as her mother lived only a couple of houses away. She even lived with us for a month when she was eighteen months old. Unfortunately her mother and her father eventually drifted apart and over the ensuing couple of years, her mother moved around a number of times but we always managed to see her regularly, even when they were living in Durban and Cape Town, many hundreds of miles away.

(Happily asleep where she belongs... in her Oupa Eddie's chair - Dec 08)

She is now seven years old, in school and living 500 kilometres away, yet she is still as much part of our family as any one of my own children and of course, equal to my own children and yet quite separate from them, she holds her very own, very special and very permanent place in my heart.