(Written in the hospital waiting room.)

You are now 21 weeks and 4 days exactly. We saw you yesterday for the third time and witnessed the aerobics that are keeping me awake at night. You wriggled and moved – arms ones way, legs another, now sucking your thumb, now moving your arms. All I could think was – this is life. This is life that we have created.

And now I am at the hospital again waiting for an ante-natal check up. I am surrounded by pregnant women of all shapes and sizes, at all stages of pregnancy. I sneak looks at them, one by one, carefully examine their bumps, comparing them to my own and mentally calculating how far along the journey they are, silently clocking what is to come. I note their age, their clothes, the books they are reading and create pictures in my mind of their individual lives. Here is a woman with her sister and her young toddler looking over their scan photos. She must be a single Mum. Husband must have left. Over there is a young girl, can’t be more than 16. Skinny and only a child herself. Got herself ‘in trouble’, too frightened to tell anyone and now it’s too late.

I realise I am staring at people, not diverting my eyes away quickly enough. But then I realise we are all doing the same, each and everyone of us, we are all sneaking glances, assessing one another, sharing in this same thing. For the first time in my life I understand what people mean by ‘sisterhood’. Today in the waiting room at Homerton hospital, we are all linked by the wonder that is creation.