I wish I had known a year ago how happy I would end up being, or how much I would enjoy this boy.

When he was born I thought he looked like a spaceman, someone who has come on a long journey and from far away. He had deep-space eyes. Undersea eyes. Dark grey and liquid and unfocused. He wasn’t my son as I know him, then. He was a cranky traveller complaining about the service.

I remember how a year ago I wanted to punch in the eye every single person who told me to ‘enjoy it because it goes by so fast!’ because time couldn’t pass fast enough for me and each endless night dragged on like a punishment.

I wish I could go back in time and find that despairing, sleep-deprived me. I wish I could give her a hug and stroke her hair and tell her to go have a nap while I watched the baby. I wish I could tell her that everything would work out all right, and that he’d learn to sleep and stop demanding food every 3 seconds and that he’d turn out to be beautiful and fierce and charming and sociable and more clever than she’d dare imagine. Of how proud she’d be of him when he learned to walk, and how much prouder still when he stopped trying to throw himself bunjee-style off high surfaces in favour of descending feet-first instead. How he’d stop arching his body back like a bow every time when she tried to soothe him, and how she’d stop resenting getting woken in the night. How on a perfect cold, bright day they’d stand together in the garden and how he’d be self-importantly picking up leaves one by one and putting them in the bin and how she’d be clapping her hands and laughing and he’d be grinning and looking fit to burst with pride at his accomplishments, and how the sky above them was vast and clear and exultant with winter light.

It is difficult to equate the person he is now, with the irascible infant he was last year, or the newborn with his cross wavy hands. It is similarly difficult to picture who he will become – the talking toddler, the self-sufficient boy, the surly teenager. I look at him and I see all the other ones waiting, stacked inside like Russian dolls.

And above all I feel this immense, sweeping gratitude at having been granted this person, this child. Having been allowed to watch him moving ahead excited and determined, throwing out his arms to meet the horizon.