Tara Skye. My divine baby. Tara is a Hindu goddess, the eternal life force and source of all life. As a Buddhist meditational deity, Tara is in various forms peaceful and compassionate, and a fierce protector who overcomes obstacles. She is a Celtic earth goddess, a female buddha – and in Sanskrit, a star.

Tara’s gifts and her teaching started during my pregnancy. I remember it well. Kai and I had almost stopped breastfeeding, and almost in reaction, he came down with a virus which kept us in bed for a week. It was a precious time together, holding him constantly, feeding and sleeping together, the last time he was my baby. At the worst point of the illness, he couldn’t walk; and then, he learned to crawl and then stand and then walk again, a symbolic growing up and away.

But it was a stressful time as well, which affected me deeply and revealed fears from Kai’s birth brushed aside in the early months of motherhood, because I didn’t have the emotional capacity to process them. I started feeling scared something was wrong with my baby. This time round, although already 16 weeks, I hadn’t had a scan. I was trying to feel my way through this pregnancy with minimal intervention of any kind – and suddenly, I was terrified.

With the support of a birth trauma counsellor, I started delving back into Kai’s birth story. The tears flowed as I told it. Over time, I began to recognise a positive side of that experience; the intensity had taught me so much and there had been incredible moments of closeness – oneness even – and spiritual truth in the darkness. I realised Kai had taught me how to access the strong, archetypal mother within myself, far wiser than I realised and ready to take charge in those times when all other energy failed me. I saw that my deep love for Kai had opened up a channel for deep fear – but then I also realised how much stronger the love is. The love is in my body, in my being – but the fear is only in my mind. Finally, hardest of all, I accepted that Kai’s journey is his journey. It is not given to mothers to choose the journey; our job is only to hold our little ones along the way in presence and love, to the best of our abilities.

Slowly I began to trust again. Without any expectation, I knew things would be ok. Without any attempt to define what I judged as ok, I knew I could handle it. I remembered the Universe never presents us with more than we are equipped to handle.  A more sober, mature, wise mother was now ready for little Tara.

Or not quite ready … Working too hard in the run-up to the birth had left me detached from my body and baby. When my due date came and went and the days went by, I struggled again to find that trust. Disconnected, I felt anxious; I wanted to control what was happening. Would Tara ever arrive?!

One evening, 10 days after my due date, I listened to some beautiful mantras, relaxed, meditated, calmed my body and mind. I connected in to Tara, at last. Are you ready? – I asked. Her answer was loud and clear – Everything is ok. I’m almost ready. Are YOU ready?

As I ended the meditation, my contractions started up again. Slowly, steadily they came, increasing in intensity. This time I knew it was real. Soon I was holding Tara in my arms.

Her lesson came a third time, a few months later. Since birth, she liked to suck on her hand, fingers, thumb; but by 3 months, the sucking was starting sometimes to feel more intransigent, more desperate. Knowing that thumb-sucking can be a control pattern, I was tuned in to a signal that things might be getting repressed. Suddenly, the fear was back, bigger than ever. My greatest desire for my children is that they should live free, in the fullness of their being and emotions, in the moment. Now, already – despite everything I knew – was Tara starting to bottle things up?

Over the next weeks, I watched the ebb and flow of the thumb-sucking. I was over-stretched again, working too hard and sleeping too little. The more stressed I became, the less present with Tara, the stronger the sucking; and as it made me more stressed still, and I resisted and wanted to control it, we got stuck. Yet the more I was able to relax, accept and allow that she knew when she needed comfort and when she was ready for release, the more the tears came of their own accord. Her instincts were still pure; but I needed to trust.

Tonight, before writing, she cried out the tensions and frustrations of the day and week. I noticed I was breathing more deeply; I felt like I could breathe again. She reached up her tiny hand and played with my hair, rapt with the joy of the exploration and the closeness. I fed her and held her in my arms. She stared up at me, her beautiful blue eyes wide open; and smiled, before her eyelids fell. In her innocence and absolute trust, she seemed to be reminding me again: everything is ok.

It’s hard to know how to start the story. It feels like a lifetime ago that it all began. Kai, my firstborn, is a child of nature. Kai means ocean in Hawaiian, earth in Scandinavian languages, willow tree in Navajo, fire in Scottish, sun in Wayuu, Universe in Persian, cycle and forgiveness in Japanese and loveable in Swahili.

Kai was conceived in an ashram in the foothills of the Himalyas, in a simple Zen chalet by the sparkling river and looking up to the snow-capped mountains. We were in the middle of an intensive 3-week meditation retreat, following a cathartic process of a week’s laughter, a week’s crying and a week’s silence. Kai’s story is full of crying.

I will never forget how I felt when I first held him. But the wonder was short-lived; he wasn’t breathing properly and was taken away for oxygen – and two hours later, into ICU for 5 days. We were told he had congenital pneumonia.

Hormones all over the place, the next days were a blur of expressing milk and visiting Kai’s bedside. I cried when the nurse first told me I could hold him; but I held him awkwardly, scared of all the wires attached to his tiny body. The first time I fed him – in the middle of a brightly-lit ward, full of blinking computer screens and the smell of disinfectant – I felt a deep home-coming. Something inside me somehow already knew this feeling. My heart ached.

Finally, we took him home and little by little, I settled into being a mother, feeling my way, and making more mistakes than I care to remember, as we navigated the first few months together. Yet as Kai got older, he seemed increasingly frustrated. He slept fitfully – if at all – and started waking frequently at night. Sometimes, he couldn’t feed – he would scream at the breast and I would hold him, bringing him to the breast again and again until he would finally latch. One night, he screamed for two hours; we took him outside and walked the labyrinth round and round until he finally calmed.

I remember attending a retreat when he was four months old; he woke 8 times one night and I was utterly exhausted. I remembered the exhaustion of labour, and how I had called on the Universe to support me when I had no strength left. I remembered I could still call on something bigger than myself for support during those days.

Eventually, I realised Kai’s crying was his attempt to heal. As I learned simply to hold him, he was able to release through tears. I felt the intensity of his pain, his fear, and his anger. Sometimes I felt a physical pain in my heart as his crying peaked; as I started crying too, the pain diminished and then both our tears slowed. I found myself reassuring him “you’re safe now” and trying to infuse his tiny body with healing love. As I held him day after day, I had a sense we were healing each other.

The lesson was as simple as it was profound. I didn’t have to make everything ok. I didn’t have to keep him permanently happy to demonstrate what a perfect mum I was. (I didn’t even have to be a perfect mum!) All I needed to do was provide a container – allow him to be “the storm in my calm” as somebody put it. I needed to provide a mirror to reflect back his feelings, however uncomfortable; and support to know that whatever he was feeling, he was strong enough to handle it and move through it.

And so we grew together: Kai into a beautiful, energetic toddler; and me into a mother. Many times, we laughed, played and cried together. Separation anxiety hit hard. He learned to walk. Got his teeth. Started talking. Many times, I got things wrong. Many times, he persisted in showing me I was off track.

He is still deeply sensitive and wary of strangers, taking a long time to size people up before he trusts them. I often wonder just how profoundly his basic trust in humanity was shattered in those first few hours. It’s hard still to imagine the fear and confusion at being separated; the physical pain from having blood sampled, stomach pumped and drips inserted; or the loneliness of being left alone in a ventilator, his first experience of this world and this life.

But he is also vibrant and joyful and incredibly compassionate and empathic. And our bond is incredibly special because of the intensity of our traumatic beginning. He was the one who cracked open my heart allowing a new depth of compassion, and he was the one who taught me how to be a mother. He is my firstborn, my first teacher – and my inspiration for writing.