'I kiss his little cheeks and I think, I made this.'

The agony and the ecstacy.

Sometimes he holds my hand while he eats. Five tiny fingers (well – four, and a thumb) wrap around one of mine and he holds on there, gently, but the grip is firm enough as if to say, don’t move.

We touch one another a lot, this baby and me. I hold him close to my face and I kiss his little cheeks and his eyelids and his mouth and I think, I made this. (Sometimes I think, we made this, but only when I’m feeling especially loving towards my husband.)

I wonder if there will come a time when I am truly tired of being touched, being grabbed, being latched on to and fed from. There are whispers of it, now and again.

When my husband gets home from work and I hand him the baby, I shake myself off like a dog coming in out of the rain.

I tell him I am going to have a shower, or to brush my teeth, or to look for something I have misplaced during the day, but I am lying. I sit on the bed for three, four, five minutes and I scroll through Instagram and my arms, with no baby in them, feel like they are mine again.

After those precious minutes alone, I do what I said I was going to do and I stand in the shower and I let the hot water run over the parts of my body that ache (the list is long) and I use a bar of soap because it reminds me of my mother and sometimes I cry because I am just having a lot of feelings right now. There is a lot going on.

I don’t luxuriate in the shower the way that I used to. When I brush the conditioner through my hair I do it with a sense of purpose; when I come up against a particularly stubborn knot, I am merciless. I have lost a lot of hair since I gave birth, and I am not sure whether this is due to hormones or the heavy hand with which I yield the comb.

I rush my shower because as soon as I have doused my head in shampoo I begin to wonder what the baby is doing. Is he crying? Screaming? Or – worse – is he delighted with his dad, looking into his eyes with the singular focus of an infant whose vision is still developing?

Sometimes, in the early mornings, when his dad has gone to work, I take a shower and leave the bathroom door open. I place the baby in his baby lounger and I cover his lower half with a blanket and I listen to his murmurs and his gurgles and, more often than not, his cries.

I do not believe in letting babies “cry it out” but neither do I believe in sweating profusely all night, waking at 6am covered in perspiration and milk and baby spit-up and not showering, so I take the shower and he cries and, when I’m done, I snatch him up and he stops crying immediately and I think, he needs me so much.

People keep telling me – well-meaning people, I’m sure, but strangers, people I do not know except through the screen of my phone, the filter of social media – that I won’t notice these moments, weeks, months, going by. “He’ll be walking before you know it!” they say, and I want to reach through the phone and punch them in their faces.

It doesn’t really matter whether they’re “right” or not. I am already grieving the time that has passed, the moments we will never experience again. Each new milestone – a three-hour nap! a snooze in his bassinet! a period of tummy time with eyes wide open – is both an accomplishment and a loss.

We move forward and I am acutely aware that each progression is a move away from the start, away from babyhood, away from infancy and towards something else. Something better?

It feels as though, in a way, he is moving – inexorably, like a slow-moving avalanche, seen from a distance – towards a place where he will not need me quite so much, until he doesn’t need me at all. The tragedy of it is that I feel as though, now that he is here – despite the fact that I didn’t know him a mere three weeks ago – I will never stop needing him.

Maybe that’s the true agony of parenthood.