Dear New Mum of 7 Years Ago,

Would you like a little teaser? See what this beautiful baby of yours is like at 7 years of age? Yeah, I know. It’s wild. 7! So those times coming up when you will just randomly wake up and check that she is breathing – I mean, still do that, but she makes it to 7. 

What’s she like? Amazing. Mind blowing. Ohhhh there’s so much but she also pushes your buttons like it’s her super power. Let’s see.

You are soon to discover sleep (the absence of). She will be a feed-to-sleep baby and, just like the professionals say, this is linked to making it tricky for her to go to sleep. Don’t change anything, of course. That’s not the point of this letter. More like, heads up. Sleep and naps will be a battle until she is almost 2, when she drops her lunchtime nap entirely and you will have a couple of glorious months before she adapts and then you are back to sleep struggles. The light at the end of the tunnel is that she does eventually sleep through. After the age of 3. But by then you will have another bub waking you up and then another so when she turns 7 you still don’t sleep through the night most nights. Also, one of the few things she inherits from you is the inability to fall asleep. Oops. Once she can read chapter books, she MIGHT be asleep before 9… or it might be approaching 11. Yes. 11pm for a newly-7-year-old to go to sleep on a school night after she has been at school and Irish dancing. 

Sadly, Glenn’s mum is not much longer for this world. She will have nearly a year with C, and see her personality developing and watch her being a cheeky monkey around her bed and see enough of C that you know that she knows her. Sioban’s presence will still be felt and she will not be at all forgotten. In fact, after C stops looking quite so much like Glenn, she starts to look like Sioban before starting – at about 2 weeks before she turns 7 – to show glimmers of you. 

At 7, C is tall (about the 80th percentile) and skinny (about 25th… 20th percentile). She is strong, and keen on healthy food – especially after your GP wanted to check her iron levels which involved a blood test and the screams oh my but it showed she was on the lower end of iron levels – but if she is sick, whether by actual gastro or by anxiety, then she gets to that gaunt stage. She is just losing the chin that you will come to adore soon, that little baby element you notice when her head is tilted back and apparently unrelated to her jaw or neck. Her nose is like yours, at least for now, and her eyes are light green like Nana Sioban and your Grandma Ruth. Her hair has gone from dark to light with reddish cradle cap, making you think she would be a redhead. It darkens as she ages and there is no more hint of red in C. Unlike many blondes, she loves that her hair is darkening and she would much rather you say she had brown – dark brown – hair that is nearly black, even though it is a long way from being black. There are curly phases, and it is on the sparse side when she is a toddler, but normalises by the start of school. At 7, she has a pixie cut that you did yourself and is growing but maybe will get a trim in the next holidays.

She is usually wanting friends to play with. If other kids rock up at the park, she is overjoyed and usually approaching them within a minute to see if they want to play. Some of your best mum friends have come from C wanting to play with a new-to-her kid at the park. At home, she will sometimes play with her sisters. Although there are games they play together, like cubbies that take over the entire living room, and families where all the roles are reversed, and kittens and mermaids and fairies and the list goes on, usually she wants to be on her own at home. You still live in the same space – a 2-bedroom apartment – with the now-5 of you. As C is very much against throwing away ANYTHING, it is starting to feel a bit crowded, to say the least, and you are trying to find ways to ditch things that won’t devastate her. We’re talking, you know, not just toys that she hasn’t played with in about 5 years, but also the rolled-up flyer from a birthday party that she says is a magic wand and an empty tissue box that you must not touch because THAT is the one that actually is a fairy house even though it … just looks like a tissue box.

C loves art, and will spend hours mixing paint to get just the right shade of peach skin tone. She also loves crafts – which you must NEVER throw away – and is an enthusiastic recycler of packaging and scraps and whatever she can imagine a use for. She spends hours reading, mostly at night when she is trying to go to sleep. She wasn’t so keen on maths at the start of prep, but by the second half of that year was starting to excel. That has continued, and she even asked for a plus sign for her birthday cake this year. Skip counting is one of her favourite things, and it will come in handy for calming her in stressful situations.

Free time is spent on the iPad when you let her. She might sing along to the theme tune – although she doesn’t always sing so well in tune, this still warms your heart – and sometimes E will sing along, too. Sometimes they have a blast singing theme songs together, and sometimes C will growl – yes, she growls – at E to stop. Fairies have overtaken unicorns and mermaids as the magical creatures of choice. Dragons are a thing from a series of chapter books about dragon girls, so you have made a set of cardboard dragon wings for her, too. Go, you crafty mum.

She is a fiddler. A fidgeter. Fidget toys soon become something you are aware of and then … they’re everywhere. She gets distracted by anything very easily. And if you take away all distractions so, for example, she can eat a meal, then she will manage to fiddle with whatever is left, like the tablecloth or the curtain. It is infuriating. But fidgets also help her brain to calm down. She is excellent at describing things, too, and seems to be unusually perceptive about emotions. C does NOT like being tickled and will usually do the St Vitus Dance if anything just brushes her and sets her off. She also does not like loud sounds and can get very overwhelmed with too much volume. 

In fact, especially just writing it all out here which makes it seem really obvious, just before Christmas when she is 6, you have a ping of realisation that she is neurodivergent. By 7, she is seeing a psychologist who is helping enormously. You still feel like a terrible mum most of the time, but now there is a little glimmer of maybe it’s not all you being a terrible mum and partly it’s that you have an exceptional child with needs outside of the standard operating procedure. Fortunately, some of those quirks – like not being able to eat anything else in her lunchbox until she has finished her sandwich – you recognise very clearly from yourself, and that makes it much, much easier to understand and love.

As I said at the start, she is excellent at pushing your buttons. Try to remember that a lot of this, as one of her prep teachers reminded you (they are the most excellent prep teachers, by the way – absolute gems and the best start for school that you could hope for) – this button pushing and doing the meltdowns for you while being an angel for everyone else – is because YOU are her safe person. This is often hard to take, but try to remember that. You are her safe person.

And your child is amazing.

With love,

You in 7 years