This is love ...

#7

This is a funny thing and really I don’t know how to measure it. We're staying at my mum and dad's. You'll know them as grandma and granddad. And all my life they stayed in a room together.

Tonight me and your mum sleep in your aunties room, my sister, and my dad sleeps in my old room, and my mum sleeps in their room.

And I'll tell you this; I don't know what to make of it. This is love. This is a thing, as yet I haven't learnt to understand and probably never will, and you'll probably spend your life trying to make sense of it.

You wonder how you'll match, who you'll match with. I can remember being maybe ten or twelve. I used to go on adventures every Saturday morning with my granddad. We'd talk about all sorts but often I'd ask him about love. Maybe I was just starting to get interested in girls or was at least toying with the idea.

And I'd ask him how you met girls and how you'd know it was the right one. I think maybe I thought the first one you met and liked would be the one forever.

It just doesn't work like that. It's so hard to explain. I think my granddad said 'you'll just know." I didn't really know what that meant.

He was right though. You do just know. Sometimes you nearly know but it's not quite right. And you have to go through all of this. I suppose that's what makes it all the more special. Though it doesn't always feel like that when you're going through it.

Me and your mum knew. You can ask her that. Sometimes, as your mum said today, someone will break your heart, and I think she thinks that somehow girls feel that worse than boys, but that isn't quite true. That hurt, that pain, you have to learn it, for some reason, to live with it, to make it make sense. And those parts feel like the worst times in the world. You can't concentrate and you think you'll never get through it. But you will and you do.

And then you find it. And it's everything you thought of and more and it's also totally not what you thought it might be and it's more than that- you're grandma just interrupted my flow- and then

Well. This is all for you to learn. And me and your mum will be there to dust you down and stand you back up again and wipe your tears and share your smiles.

And me and your mum get to learn a new type of love too. We get to love you in a way we've never loved before and we know that already.

Your mum has a special bond with you because you’re growing inside her and I have a special bond with you too. We can both feel you already and you're the most important thing in the world and you always will be.