When I was in my late 20s, I was in a relationship for three years. Somewhere over the passing of those years a mutual assumption formed, that we would try to have children. The relationship ended when I was thirty. I carry so many good memories of our relationship, and some physical mementos too, one of which is a postcard that he gave to me. It’s blank on the writing side, acquired purely for the sketched portrait by Catherine Väse on its glossy side, of a curly haired girl, around two or three years old. My boyfriend thought that this little girl looked like the daughter that we might be lucky enough to have. I recognised why. The tightness of her curls, the brown hair and pale complexion, she looked like a miniature version of me. I have kept it in a shoe box for the seventeen years since we broke up. It serves as a memento of what could have been. Recently I have been thinking about it more and more.

Now I am forty seven years old and married to a different man and I am mother to two sons one of whom is twelve and the other who is eight. Everyday I observe and absorb them.; the smoothness of their shoulders, the little six packs, the questions, the wonder, their painful discoveries of growing up, and every day I am aware, because I make a point of being aware, of the jackpot I have won in getting to spend this part of my life with them.

But I can’t stop thinking about having a daughter.

I think it too. How dare I want a daughter when I already have children? How insulting to deign two healthy sons as lacking in any way when there are people in the world who try for years to have children and can’t. I shouldn’t write about it I thought initially, as it feels ludicrously indulgent and spoilt to want more than the two I already have, but it’s real, this yearning and I’m trying to figure out why.

What does it feel like? A sort of undercurrent of wanting. My vision of her is almost spectral; ever present but never actually there. When my family and I are in the kitchen, I place her with in the room with us, tottering around singing to herself. I talk to her in my head. I imagine the feel of her little chubby fingers in mine, inverted knuckles.

I imagine that her older brothers would be fascinated by her, and grow to be protective of her. I imagine my youngest boy as a middle child. What it would do to him to have an idolising younger sibling who would play with him willingly, provide assistance for the making of his potions and dens. I imagine her delighting us, making us laugh, filling in the morning silence with chatter. In my head she fits into the shape of our family perfectly. She is the missing piece.

I am the youngest of four siblings. It was and remains to be very normalised in Ireland to come from a large sprawling family. In my head, I had hoped for three children. I had my first at thirty four, my second at thirty eight. When I started talking about the possibility of trying for a third, my husband presented me with an argument I could not counter. At the time, my biggest source of worry and anxiety as a parent was that because of my career, I wasn’t able to be there enough for my sons. Why would I bring another child into the world when I didn’t feel that I had enough time for the two that were already here?

It was bruising to hear because it was true. I had a full time job in radio, which meant I missed dinner and bedtime every weekday evening and another job as a DJ which took me away at weekends. I didn’t have the head space to see a way out of my busyness so I had to reluctantly agree with him at the time. It took years to dismantle my career and rebuild it again in order to be more flexible and have more time for my kids.

And now, because of that dismantling, my life looks very different. Now, I’m around when they finish school. I’m around at night to sit in their rooms, to read to them, and hear them out when they want to talk. There are of course busy times, but I’m no longer in a permanent state of stress. I have also, after years of wrangling about whether to move to Ireland, made the decision to stay in London for the time being. All this to say, when it comes to having another child in the house, there would be room now. There would be space in my head. There would be time.

Why this want to mother a daughter? I think the answer lies in how I was mothered. I think of my relationship with my mother, how her gentle kindness shaped me. I think of the outfits she made on her sewing machine for me to wear. The weekly trips to the library. I think of sitting on the little seat on the back of her bike, wearing a pixie hat she knitted, scratchy on my face, as she cycled down the hill to pick up my brothers and sister from school. I think of when I got my period first and it leaked in bed at night and I woke up surrounded by blood and how violent and and frightening it felt in the darkness and how she cleaned it up and cleaned me up and didn’t allow me to feel anything but safe, and I think of how I would like to do that for a girl, I would like to guide them through what it is to unfurl into your yourself and your body

I dug the postcard out of the shoe box again for this piece. Looked at it hard. Then I got my childhood photo album out. I looked nothing like this little girl as a child. My hair was brushed straight. I had red ruddy cheeks and blue eyes. In several of the photos, I am crying, squirming out of my mother’s or my grandmothers arms. In another few you can only see half of me as I crawl out of shot. The overall atmosphere of these photos is one of chaos and noise, a chaos that I have no clear memory of anymore. Everything is buried deep in my psyche, behind some closed door. I came out relatively unscathed from the chaos, but my mother was in the middle of it for years. My mother bore the brunt of it.

I flick back to the beginning of the photo album and there I am, newly born, grave faced, one first clenched, one eye half closed. Beside the photo my mothers writing…

Annie Macmanus

Born In Coombe Hospital Dublin

8 Days late. 9 lbs 6 ozs.

Another blue eyes bobble nosed Macmanus. breach birth – fast and furious!

Oh the ironic weight of that one exclamation mark. Breach birth. Haha! Ah yes. Daughters start as babies and babies have to be born. I look back at the postcard and realise that in all of my imaginings this ghost daughter of mine is the age of the girl on the postcard. She is already two or three years old. I’m conveniently skipping over the pregnancy part, the labour part, the breast feeding part. Do I really actually want that again? I sit and allow my head to remember the smell of my sons when they were babies, the warmth of their skin, the deep black abysss of their eyes, their first smiles…I wait for some internal clenching, some sort of physical or emotional pulse or craving, but there is nothing. I feel nothing.

I don’t really want a daughter. Not really, not in real life. I’m forty seven years old. The idea of me pushing a pram into a CT class now is so far fetched it’s actually comical. The idea of watching my stretch marks form all over again, scars upon scars…the idea of carrying this huge heft of weight around with me. Not once have I taken the time to imagine the possibility of hard times. Post natal depression. Complications in pregnancy or labour. Or just the straight fact that we might not have a bond. This little daughter could be someone I can’t get through to. Someone who confounds me and confuses me. I’d be sixty when she was starting puberty. And the wild assumption that if I was lucky enough to have a healthy baby, that it would be a girl! I’m in fucking la la land.

So who is this happy little ghost girl running around my kitchen then? Am I grieving the daughter I never had? My period remains as regular as clockwork. Is this my body ringing its last orders bell? Why this mirage-like vision of perfection? Am I under some sort of hormonal spell, or is there something deeper going on?

I have been watching my mother grow older. There was a warm evening in August just gone, on our annual Summer trip back to see family in Ireland, when I accompanied my mother on her slow lap of the local park. She clung on to my arm with her left hand, her right hand gripped her walking stick. At one point we looked up to see loads of white birds criss crossing the sky above us, erratically, flying in haphazard directions .. it’s strange, we said, the opposite of formation, anti-formation.. we stood holding on to each other, our faces tipped up to the sky, and concluded that maybe the birds were playing, just enjoying themselves. A little further on, from beyond the tree canopy above us, came the low throaty rasp of a wood pigeon. Mum stopped, cocked her head, said I love that sound. I said , me too. We turned to smile at each other. Such a seemingly inconsequential thing, a slow walk in the dusk with my Mother, but everything about the evening, the weather and the air and the sounds and the sights, was gentle, just like her. That little exchange. That revelation that we both love the same bird call. I never knew.

I have not allowed my thoughts to travel towards any sort of comprehension of living without her. Maybe this little girl in my kitchen is my brain’s way of processing my desire for the closeness I have with my mother to live on somehow.

There are no straight answers. The silent presence of my non existent daughter remains. Maybe she will vanish into nothingness over the years. Maybe she will remain there, visible only to me, singing and chattering to herself in the near background of every family tableau.

In the meantime the postcard is back in the shoebox, the photo album is back on the shelf. I’m flying to Dublin tomorrow to see my Mother and I’ve registered on Pets4Homes. What am I looking for? A small female dog of course.