haircut. Normally I’d have politely declined, as I wasn’t very good with kids, but this time I welcomed the opportunity to spend some time with a young child. You see, even though I did want to be a mother, I’d never been very maternal. In fact I’d never even held a baby or played with a young child. I felt uncomfortable around children. I didn’t think they liked me. If truth be told, I was a little apprehensive about becoming a mother and wondered if I was up to the task. I figured that it was high time I gave myself a trial run, so to speak.
When I arrived at my friend’s house, she greeted me at the door. I’d seen Sophie, her daughter, a few times before, but we had not been formally introduced. She was like a little doll and said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ with an adorable lisp. Then she laughed and laughed before saying, ‘Abir says hello.’ I looked at my friend and she shrugged her shoulders and explained that Sophie was ‘at that imaginary friend stage’ and I should just ignore her. But I was working as a magazine journalist gathering stories for a series of articles about the paranormal, and I was immediately fascinated. I had no idea where this fascination would take me.
As soon as my friend had hugged Sophie, told her to be a good girl and left for her appointment, I asked her to tell me more about Abir. She was happy to oblige and told me that Abir was an angel who came to her whenever she wanted to see her. Chills ran through my body and I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from my bag. I knew this was important and that I needed to write down exactly what she said. I asked her to tell me about Abir and this is roughly the gist of it:
Abir is my angel and she comes to me. She’s in this room now. Look just behind you. I always know when she is going to appear because whenever she is near she makes things smell fresh and lovely. She’s very beautiful and always smiling. She thinks you should smile more.
Sophie then drew a picture of Abir with huge blue wings and a purple light surrounding her and said I could keep it as a present because it would remind me to smile when my baby was born.
There was so much more I wanted to ask her, but just as I was about to, her mother came back home looking crestfallen. There had been confusion at the hairdresser’s and her appointment had been double booked. Being the kind person she was, she had decided to stand down for the other person and book an appointment another day. I told her that I’d be more than happy to sit with Sophie then. I showed her the picture she had drawn of Abir and she said I was welcome to keep it as she had quite literally hundreds. She opened a drawer and took out a dozen or so of Sophie’s angel drawings to show me, and all of them had the same smiling face and wings. Then she told me something which made me feel sad and I wasn’t sure why: she had a plan to knock ‘all this nonsense’ out of Sophie’s head.
As the day wore on I could not keep away from the picture Sophie had drawn of Abir. Even though her story sounded incredible, I believed it was possible she could be in contact with an angel because she was obviously an intelligent child. I did some research on the name Abir and was amazed to discover that not only was it an extremely rare name that Sophie was unlikely to have heard of but that its meaning was ‘fragrance’. Sophie had told me that things smelled fresh and beautiful whenever Abir appeared.
A few days later I looked after Sophie again when her mother went for her hair appointment. This time I sat with her at my own house. I was keen to talk about Abir, but Sophie was in the mood for playing, not talking, and had brought a sack of toys with her. I didn’t want to push things, so after I settled her down in the front room I started to do some light cleaning and tidying up behind her. I was just about to throw away a bunch of shrivelled roses that had been standing in a vase for way too long when Sophie ran towards me and begged me not to because Abir would look after them. I felt it was easier to comply with her than go into a long explanation, so I left them where they were and forgot about them.
The next morning I couldn’t believe my nose when I came down the stairs and was hit by the strongest rose aroma I had ever smelled. I went into my front room and couldn’t believe my eyes: my roses looked resplendent. There were even beautiful pink buds where dead stalks had been the day before.
I couldn’t wait to tell Sophie’s mum about the roses, but when I did she told me that she knew I meant well but she didn’t want to indulge Sophie’s ‘nonsense talk’. Respecting her wishes as a parent, I promised never to mention angels again when I met Sophie. I stuck to my promise and Sophie didn’t seem unduly distressed, especially once her mother had bought her a puppy to play with. Later I discovered that she’d been promised the dog if she never mentioned Abir again. I felt sad but whenever I saw Sophie with her new pet I liked to think that her guardian angel was still with her, just in animal form.
In my Dreams
A few weeks after my chat with Sophie, anxiety about becoming a mother began to get the better of me. I was an organized, tidy person and one thing I did know about babies was that they were untidy, chaotic, unpredictable and demanding. I was fine during the day when I was busy with my writing, but when I was relaxing in the evenings I worried about not being able to cope. I worried about labour and delivery. I worried about my child having an abnormality or dying during the pregnancy or labour. I worried about dying myself. I worried about whether I would bond properly with the baby, given that I didn’t feel that comfortable around children. I worried that I would be a terrible parent. I worried about money. I worried about combining work with motherhood. I worried about what having a baby would do to my body and to my marriage. I think you get the picture. I was a worry wort and it was starting to make me ill.
One night after I’d been reading some pregnancy magazines full of advice and tips, I felt overwhelmed. A wave of panic took over. Voices in my head told me that I wasn’t going to be able to handle this. My husband was away on business, so I had no one to cling to for reassurance. I lay down in bed, shaking and sweating, and pulled the covers over myself. I was finding it hard to breathe and my heart was beating so loudly it seemed as if it was going to burst out of my chest. It felt as though the whole world was swirling around me. My mouth had never felt so dry. I was absolutely convinced that I was either dying or going mad. Then I felt an overwhelming tiredness.
I must have fallen into a deep and heavy sleep, because when I woke up the next morning I felt calm and centred. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and then looked down at my bump and gave it a gentle rub. As I did so, memories of a vivid dream flooded back into my mind.
In my dream I had been walking alone in the most beautiful countryside. It resembled the Lake District, a place dear to my heart. I decided to climb a mountain so I could get a splendid view from the top. The climb started easily enough, but soon I ran into difficulties. I hadn’t been pregnant at the start of the dream, but I was now. I was hugely pregnant and struggling to put one foot in front of the other. Turning back wasn’t an option, as when I looked behind me the path had disappeared. The only way was up.
Exhausted, I sat down. Then I became aware of a little boy tugging at my arms and telling me to get up. He was olive skinned and about five years old and had dark eyes like chocolate buttons. I told him I couldn’t climb anymore but he just laughed and told me that I could. His belief in me was infectious and I found myself following him up the hill. He was right–it didn’t seem so hard to climb then and before long I was at the top of the mountain. The view was spectacular. I turned around to look for the boy, but he had gone. I called out for him, worried that he might not have made it. I didn’t see him again but heard his voice saying, ‘You won’t get it right all the time and that’s fine by me.’
I must have woken up then because I couldn’t remember any more of the dream, but the words ‘You won’t get it right all the time’ really struck a chord. In a flash of insight–an ‘aha moment’, as it is sometimes called–I understood that becoming a parent was something I would need to learn as I went along. I wouldn’t get it right all the time and shouldn’t even try, because no one does. In any case, there was no right or wrong way to do things, just the way that suited me and my family. And if I did make mistakes I would learn from them, just as I would from the things that went right.
I’m not saying that after this dream the worrying stopped completely–it didn’t–but I didn’t have another panic attack and for the first time since I had found out I was pregnant I knew in my heart