I had finished reading for the evening, satisfied that I was being consistent with my measures of self-preservation. It was time to buckle down........ and stare at Ruby. She was asleep beside me, tucked beneath the duvet. I watch for fifteen minutes as small movements alternately show between her left cheek and her right hand of digits. I whisper and coo, and she smiles in her dreaming. I study the flatness of her thumbnail before looking at the flatness of my own. I tickle her wrist and kiss the bulge of her palm. I think about my years as a young girl, an adolescent, then a woman, and the divisions between those titles as being blurred the further along I go.

I think about Ruby as a young girl, as an adolescent, a woman and have deep hopes and heave deep sighs. River is my son, my boy. She is to be a model of my better times, my best and beyond what I have been. Now that I have a daughter, there is deep pressure to forgive myself for my times in becoming a woman. Those trials of great risk and great neurosis behind me, in a way, that are implicit in womanhood - particular to the women who developed at a solitary and strangely wild rate; free from the immediate influence of premature monogomous relationships... women who came of age basically untethered and on their own. Having entered motherhood with more life experience than I can bare to consider, I shoulder the task ahead... beyond the tender appreciative and surrendering kisses of adoration. I'm still here, and I am witness. Sweet dreams, Ruby.