Candles & dandelions: on celebration and letting go, and the cycles that carry us forward

For me, March begins and ends with birthdays. My forever baby girl, Poppy, would have been eleven on the 4th. My daughter, Cece, was 15 on the 29th. They sit like bookends to the month, marking time not just in years, but in who is here, who is growing, and who is missing - and the space in between.

The flickering flame and the forward pull

Eleven feels big in a way I can’t quite articulate. It’s not one of the milestone birthdays people usually make a fuss over, and yet I find myself imagining it more vividly than I expected. Eleven feels like a threshold - old enough to have opinions, a sense of self, an idea of the world and how to exist in it, starting to solidify.

I catch myself wondering what Poppy would have been into, what music she would have loved. I wonder, would she have been a Swiftie like her sister? Whether she and her sister and brothers would have been super-close, or constantly at odds in that way siblings can be?

There is no way to answer those questions, of course. So they just arrive and stay, like uninvited guests I don’t turn away from a birthday party.

And then, at the other end of the month, there is the pull forward of her sister’s life, ever closer towards adulthood.

Fifteen. I can hardly reconcile that number with the small person I still sometimes expect to walk into a room. She has so quickly become so unmistakably herself, and it is such a beautiful privilege to watch. There’s a particular kind of awe in seeing that happen in real time. The way her world is expanding, the way she carries ideas, friendships, morals, opinions and frustrations that are entirely her own now.

I feel proud, of course. So very proud. But if I’m honest, there’s something else there, too - a persistent ache. Not because of anything she is or isn’t, but because every step forward into the richness of her life, and my joy in watching her, also sharpens the outline of what might have been.

Waiting to exhale

This is the strange arithmetic of love and loss, isn’t it? Joy doesn’t cancel out grief. They don’t take turns. They coexist, layered on top of one another, sometimes indistinguishable at first glance. I’ve learned not to try to separate them.

But this year, there has been something else here in the month, too. Something steadier. Grounded, rooted in my past, but also propelling me into a future shaped by my entire existence: motherhood, career, and a deep-rooted sense of purpose that has grown over this past decade, alongside my experience of mothering in real time, and in the suspended reality of learning how to mother a baby who isn’t here.

Because this month hasn’t just been about looking back or holding space for what isn’t here. It has been about taking a deep breath and stepping fully into where I am and who I am right now.

A new beginning

At the beginning of March, I started a new job.My first salaried, pro-rata 4-day-a-week, non-freelance position in seventeen years. A job where I go to an office. Where I have a title. Where I work alongside a team. All with the same shared purpose.

Even writing that feels significant and emotional. For so long, my working life has been something I shaped around everything else. Luckily, writing was my passion, something that fulfilled me creatively, but it was always freelance, flexible, built around my life as a mum of young children.

But they are no longer small - two of them literally tower over me! - even my baby, my eight-year-old son, is becoming more independent every day. Sleepovers, cub camps, after-school clubs - all things that make my working days longer, the space for me bigger than it has been in almost twenty years. In the same way that the space around grief grows over time, too.

For years, I wanted to put off the day when I considered ‘What next?’. When motherhood could perhaps move into a position alongside other things that are important to me, rather than always being in pole position.

The slow burn of purpose

When I left my last full-time job in late 2008 to go on maternity leave with my first baby, I decided I never wanted to work in an office again. I believed I would always freelance, write books, and work from home. It meant freedom, you see. The ability to live life as I wanted to, to choose creativity and passion and fit them around my family.

And yet in my 40s, those things became less important than they once were, that freedom was actually, well, kind of stifling, suffocating. And something called purpose took over. A sense of why am I here? What is important to me? How do I want to use my voice?

At the end of this year, I will turn 50. And those decisions about what I do, how I spend my time, what I want to leave behind have become even more urgent - necessary, not a nice-to-have.

This weaving together of passion and purpose started with This Wasn’t Meant to Happen was a desire to both give something and leave behind something meaningful, something I could be truly proud of - not to feed my own ego; not because it was ‘impressive’ to be an author, or because writing books meant I had achieved something (I admit those things drove me in my 20s and 30s), but because writing that novel was something I needed to - no, had to do, for other people.

But once it was finished, in the hands of my publishers, and then out in the world, I found myself struggling to know what I might write next. I knew I wanted to write another book (writing is as much a part of me of who I am as being a mother is), but I also knew I could only do so if I had a deep-rooted connection to it. A purpose for it to be written. To exist. To give my precious time to. And that might mean waiting. It might take time.

The gift of giving

And then, at the beginning of December, came an early, unexpected gift.

I saw a job advert that felt entirely written for me. A calling, you might say. Something that about ambition, or title, or money, or trajectory. Not about status or desperation. But pure purpose. It felt like the final piece of a jigsaw I had been putting together for eleven years. Perhaps longer.

It drew everything together. My decade as a magazine journalist. Fifteen years of writing novels. The more recent chapter of freelancing in social media, marketing, comms, PR work that sometimes felt like a pivot, sometimes a compromise, but which I can now see was an expansion.

All of it was leading somewhere, even if I couldn’t quite see it at the time.Because when the book buzz quietened - as it always does, and I knew it would - I realised something unexpected. It wasn’t another book deal I was chasing.

It was the work itself.

The continuation of writing about and advocating for the baby loss community. The conversations and the support. The writing about the messy beauty, the heart-shattering cracks that you gradually fill with gold - the beautiful but broken kintsugi that is baby loss motherhood. The purpose within it that I needed in my life, beyond my book.

After I became Ambassador of Petals back in September, I used to joke with Karen, the CEO, that I wanted a desk in the office.

And then…

A call for a storyteller. Someone who understood words and people. Someone who could hold both strategy and compassion. Someone who could communicate not just clearly, but meaningfully.

And for the first time in seventeen years, I knew.

Not hoped. Not wondered. Knew.

That everything I had been through - every role, every pivot, every piece of writing, every conversation, every moment of grief and growth - had, somehow, led me here.

So for the last month, that’s where I’ve been. Leaning into my new role as Marketing and Communications manager for Petals, this incredibly special baby loss counselling charity, that once helped me through my own grief.

Showing up. Learning. Contributing. Giving back. Sitting at that desk I once joked about, and recognising, with astonishment, that I am exactly where I am meant to be.

And perhaps that is what feels so striking about this particular March. That alongside the grief I carry, and the love that continues to grow and change shape, there is also this deep, purposeful joy. The kind that comes from alignment. From recognising your place. From understanding that the path - even when it has felt uncertain or painfully nonlinear, or just painful - has been taking you somewhere all along.

Proof, also perhaps, that the skills and experience we gather along the way are rarely wasted. And if I’m honest, as a perimenopausal, freelance creative woman - a ‘stay-at-home-mum’ who has spent years quietly asking what I can possibly bring to the table in a workplace, the realisation that the answer is actually ‘a lot’- well, that alone has been something of a reckoning.

This role isn’t just the sum of my professional life. It holds something much deeper than that. Woven through it is the part of my life that has never fit neatly onto a CV.

Time, love and togetherness

The eleven years of being a mother without her baby.
The ongoing work of raising the children who are here, while also learning- every day - how to mother the one who isn’t.

So I find myself here, now, blowing out candles and dandelion clocks, one by one and watching them take root once again.

Eleven.
Fifteen.
Fifty.
Loss.
Love.
Passion.
Purpose.
What was.
What is.
What might have been.
And what, finally, feels like a becoming.

All these delicate fragments are not the beginning, nor the end. They are part of a cycle - of rooting, rising, releasing, and returning. With them, we are constantly remade into something more beautiful. Carried on the wind, and in our wishes, too.