This is a bit of a random idea that came to me as I was walking home (I blame the 'pretty red sky'). There is some degree of spoilery-ness to this fic but pretty much only up to this week (21/1/14) but it's kinda my version of spoilers (sort of). I think this is a one shot. I hope this is ok (I think one bit towards the end is inaccurate but the rest should be relatively correct), and I appreciate any reviews left.

Dearest Darling Emma,

You probably don't remember given you weren't yet born at the time and therefore unable to consciously take much in but on the night I went in to labour with you the sky shone red.

In fact I explained to your as yet unborn self the reasons behind this phenomenon. I told you that there is a reason for everything.

For some a red sky means more than what I told you. Should it appear at night – as we, I - observed it, it is considered to be a good sign but a sky which glows red in the morning is taken as a warning sign. Only for me, for us, the opposite was true.

As I stood there, my body gave me the first warning of your all too imminent arrival. That first pain, nowhere near as intense as those that came later, yet it was the one which shook me the most. The reality that your birth was closer than I had anticipated. Perhaps I shouldn't have suggested we observe the next morning's sunrise together, maybe then you would have stayed safe in my uterus for seven more days.

I would have done anything to keep you there, to keep you safe. But you had other ideas and my plans were altered by the rupturing of your membranes – and with it the loss of your protective barrier.

I should have known a child of mine would be headstrong, that it would truly be you running the show but it had seemed to me that as a consultant – and indeed the best one in Holby not just of the team concerned with you - that it should be me taking the lead as always. Yet you, a fetus, showed me differently.

Your birth should have been different though. I wanted what was best for you and I had everything planned. I'd done my research, I'd read everything I could get my hands on in order to formulate your birth plan. Perhaps if things had worked out, if I had been able to go through with this plan of mine it could have become a piece of published research on how birth should be done to ensure the best outcome for a fetus such as you. But more than that I was going to be in control. I wasn't going to be one of those women who screamed as though they were being tortured nor was I going to be so drugged up that I couldn't feel anything. I was going to do things right.

For you I was only going to take gas and air even though that glorified nurse said that as a red head I would need more. Even if I had I wouldn't have given in. My choice was made for you. The gas and air leaves the body so quickly that it would have had little to no effect on you and that was what mattered. If I took pethidine it would help me but what about you? Those babies – healthy babies – who are born with depressed breathing because of that drug, whose heart rates are lowered and who struggle because it has all but knocked them out – and then there's you with so many struggles ahead of you already, how could I make it harder for you just so that labour would be more bearable for me? Besides if Mo could do it as she did, then so could I.

Only it didn't work out like that. You didn't get the birth you deserved and once more I failed you. If you had been born normally the process of birth would have pushed the fluid clear of your as yet unused lungs. They tried to tell me that the caesarean section made little difference, that getting you breathing would have been no easier than had you be born as I'd wanted, but to me they were empty words.

As I lay on that table, waiting for you to be pulled free from my body, I've never felt like that before. This – your birth – was the last thing that I could do for you. After that point it was the NICU staff that you needed and not me.

My little Emma. In the moments following your arrival in to the world, I turned my face away from you. You were rushed to the resuscitaire before it was deemed more vital that you be whisked elsewhere and I didn't even look at you. Your daddy, he couldn't take his eyes from you, pleading for anyone to let him – us I suppose really – know that you were alive. But me, I stayed quiet, not daring to look.

Should I really tell you that it was many more days before I saw you? Should I tell you that each time someone offered me a ride in a wheelchair so that I could see you when I wasn't yet fully mobile that I would make up an excuse as to why I couldn't go or that once I was mobile, I would walk elsewhere when it was suggested that I visit you? When people said they would walk with me, I would feign tiredness or go dizzy claiming that the effects of blood loss were catching up with me, all the while knowing that my FBC had remained within normal limits and that my lochia too had been normal. I am not proud of what I did, and yet I do not know that I could've done anything else.

Your daddy, he didn't understand. When you were 24 hours old, he bought me up a photo of you now that Ralph had been sterilised and given to you. He was so proud of that photo and yet I barely even looked at you in it. Instead I saw wires, tubes and machines. Things so familiar to me, and yet in their minute size so alien at the same time. These pieces of medical technology that were keeping you alive, just as I would use similar equipment to do the same for my patients.

Your daddy could see past all that to see you – or maybe I was concentrating on it so that I didn't have too. Seeing you would make all of this real. Before this, before you were born, I loved the feel of you inside of me, to know that you were with me constantly, and to love you. But it was strange to think of you existing outside of my body, knowing that once that happened you would no longer need me. In those days I missed the feel of you so, and I would find myself touching the still swollen, but now empty, place where you had been wishing that I could still feel you there.

That was the day I told your daddy to concentrate all of his efforts on you, that he should stay with you rather than visiting me because I would have Sacha, Mo and Elliot while you just had him. I don't know if he noticed that I said him rather than us, if he did he didn't acknowledge it and at the time NICU were being much more sniffy about 'non-family members' visiting you so he had less of a counter argument anyway.

The first time I properly stepped foot in to your room in NICU, you were six days old and I didn't even approach the spot where you lay. All I did was stay long enough to issue you your name before I disappeared. I did do you a favour though in picking your name. Your daddy's choices were much less palatable, and Emma, well, Emma seemed like a good name.

But I was still trying to do my best for you, just in my own way. I could do so very little but I made sure that NICU always had a supply of milk available for you. My milk is about the only thing I thought I could give you and if it helped in some small way then it was worth it. They call it liquid gold, did you know that? I don't remember ever telling you but it sounds good doesn't it and you deserved the best.

If things had been different, I think I'd have wanted to be one of those mothers who has the baby placed on their bare chest immediately after birth, and because I would already have explained the principle too you, I'd have expected you to initiate the crawl to my breast in search of your first feed. Of course as things were I had no need to teach you this. Why dwell on something we never could have had, and yet still I missed it, of having that moment of discovering you when you were still so new, meeting you despite having known you for so many months. Perhaps it would have made the empty feeling inside less, if this had happened.

The reality of our first real meeting is so very different. Your daddy had barely left your side at all since the day I had told him to devote himself to you entirely. The longest time I think he left you for was those meetings we had with your consultant, on the day when your daddy realised that I had been avoiding you, on the day that I was forced to confront my fears for you. That was the day I named you.

On the day I met you, your daddy's exhaustion was so evident on his face. The reality of life spent in NICU spelled out across his unshaven face, and those eyes so desperately tired and yet so doggedly determined not to give in and miss a moment of you, to having to leave you. My own exhaustion was much more expertly masked, and I would be surprised if he knew.

You see as much as I wasn't spending time with you, that didn't mean that you weren't on my mind. In those months since I learned of your diagnosis, I poured over everything I could about keeping you safe inside and the preparations for giving you the best chance of surviving birth. In those first two weeks of your life, I devoted myself to reading everything I could about the surgery that you needed to give you the greatest chance of life.

I don't think anyone knows I did that. I spent hours in the medical library, slept in there more nights than I care to admit while the rest were spent in my desk chair where I would fall asleep surrounded by books, journals and my computer. It did nothing for my caesarean wound but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that I could ensure that Mr Solis and his team did the best for you. If I had found one shred of evidence that there was a better, safer way then he would have heard about it and nothing would have been done to you until that avenue had been fully explored. For you were just this tiny baby, barely 14 days old, and already facing major surgery.

And so I had to brave seeing you. I had hovered in the doorway, at a distance, glancing at the machines and their readouts to try to ascertain your condition but I didn't dare come close to you. I tried to forget that your daddy told me you had a tuft of my red hair, and I tried not to imagine how your 5lb 9oz would feel in my arms, or how tiny you would look cradled in your daddy's. But I had to see you. Approaching you was one of the hardest things I have had to do, to see you lying so helpless amongst those wires, the tube fed down your tiny trachea to force your mechanical breaths. You were so still, not the wriggling little girl I had known within me but this tiny helpless little creature with a stuffed pig keeping watch over you while your daddy took a toilet break and a tiny pink hat covering that tuft of red hair I tried to ignore you had.

And I had run scared. I saw you and I signed the consent that said that you were to have surgery and then once more I left you. I left you to return to my work, to a patient I thought I could help more than I could help you. What use did you have for someone sitting around waiting for news of you when upstairs on Darwin I could actually help someone by performing the surgery that could save their life?

I'm not the person to be sitting around. I need to feel in control, to be doing something. If they would let me in that theatre, to be the one wielding the scalpel, to feel like I was doing something then maybe I could be the one to support you, but they tell me that isn't what you needed from me. They tried to tell me that you don't need a surgeon – you already have one of those – but instead you need a mother, the person to hold your tiny hand as your daddy does and to tell you stories and sing you songs.

And if we get down to the truth of it Emma, it's not my inability to do that, to be that person that stopped me from trying to be there for you, that made me try to help my patient before I was able to go and be with you, and your daddy. It's something more than that.

But you see, dear girl, I did go. I did sit there during your surgery. Being on the other side, it's a strange feeling. How many relatives have sat this way while I've worked on their loved one? I've lost count along the way but I'd warrant it's a rather frightening figure. But I've rarely thought about being on that side. The emotions, the feelings – they make things messy and much more complicated. In theatre, there's no need for it. Nothing matters in that environment beyond the tools in your hand, and the organs before you.

Only on that day, it wasn't just organs on the table, it wasn't just people in the waiting room. My patient could have been you, and those parents in the waiting room me and your daddy. Indeed hours later it was that way round and I have never been more terrified as I sat in that claustrophobic airless room waiting for news of you, clutching at your daddy's hand as though my life depended on it.

We could've talked, but any words would've been swallowed by the room. How can you express to someone how you feel when you don't really understand it yourself, or don't want to accept it? I could tell your daddy my story in the hope that it would help him to understand, but to tell my story means to open up in a way that I find difficult. It's why I scoffed at the idea of writing this letter when it was first suggested to me, not long after your operation. A way of helping me to understand and address all these thoughts in my head, only I thought it was one of those ridiculous ideas that is actually good for nothing at all – other than causing all of those things you keep tucked away in the back of your mind to be let loose.

So we stayed quiet, but not an uncomfortable silence. It was a silence we both needed. Maybe he wanted to ask me why I've been so distant with you and what has changed since the day you were born, and maybe I wanted to be able to answer that question. But that day, that room, it wasn't the time. Instead we watched the door, until someone came to tell us that you'd made it through.

I'd love to tell you that was the defining moment. The one in which I realised how stupid I had been in leaving you alone, but I once promised I would never lie to you and so I won't. I did go with your daddy to visit you once you'd been stabilised enough for us to do so. You were so tiny, so vulnerable lying there with the bandage wrapped around your tiny chest, protecting the wound. It had occurred to me in that moment, that already we are so alike, scarred by this world. But you, this tiny precious being, should have been safe from all of that.

I remember them telling us we were lucky. You'd come through the surgery better than anticipated, and that we should be proud of you. Your daddy had beamed at that "our clever wee Emma" he had proclaimed in that way of his. But me, I had seen it a little differently. Our praise should have been aimed at the surgeon, the one who had brought you to this point. The one who made us lucky because we still had you in our lives.

Hours later, I was back at your side in NICU, and you were still lying there, utterly helpless. And your consultant had approached me, not with caution as so many others did but with a determination. You were 20 days old by this point, and so much of me couldn't believe that you had made it this. Yet still I was forcing myself to keep a distance, I would sit by your side and yet I barely took you in. Instead I would study your monitors, watching for miniscule changes that I would need to alert the staff too, only you remained stable. It was almost like you were begging me to look at you, like your stability and the lack of change in your monitors was your way of saying "mummy I'm fine, look at me, love me" because your daddy would joke to Mo that you were a little monkey who liked to set the monitors off for a bit of attention from the nurses, yet you never did it with me around.

But that day, Mr Solis, he came to me and without words, he scooped you up wires and all and placed you in my arms. When he stepped back, he whispered something about it being against protocol and that we wouldn't have long but he forced me to hold you.

It was strange to have the weight of you against me once more, and to have to adjust my arms around your wires to prevent myself dislodging something of importance while trying not to drop you. It has to be said, this is a near impossible task without looking, and so I had to look down at this tiny bundle in my arms. Your tiny hat had slipped askew on your head, allowing me to see your tuft of hair – so like mine – for the first time. I remember moving my fingers so cautious to stroke that soft fuzz of hair, and how I had to force my eyes not to well with tears as the reality of you hit me with full force.

My darling Emma, holding you for the first time, I felt a guilt like I had never known before. All the time I was pregnant with you, I had promised you that I would be the mother you deserved, that you would have better than I did and yet I had failed you on that. I was like my own mother, physically present but otherwise somewhere different entirely. I saw things clinically as though you were a patient and not my daughter, my flesh and blood. As I held you in my arms, everything I had tried to ignore came at me with an intensity that was overwhelming.

And then it was over, and Mr Solis scooped you away though my arms seemed frozen in the position they'd used to hold you. When your daddy returned to us, so did my guilt. Here he had done everything for you and yet I had been the first to hold you. He should have been the one to have that moment with you, because at that time I didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve you.

That night I returned home, and that was the first time I broke down since you were born. If it were anyone else I would wonder how they'd held it together until that point. I think many wondered how I was doing so, but the truth is that's just me. I keep things bottled away, because it is easier than dealing with emotions. Things should hurt less if you don't feel to begin with.

And that was why I tried to distance myself from you. I loved you for so long, to the point where I couldn't imagine a life without you in it. But it was a love that frightened me, because while I couldn't bear the thought of carrying on in this world while you were no longer a part of it that was a very real possibility. Somewhere in my twisted brain, I thought that if I could stop myself loving you any more than I already did, from becoming any more attached to you then it wouldn't hurt so much if you died. I was frightened of loving you, of bonding with you and then of losing you.

I thought you would be ok without me, because you had all of those doctors and nurses surrounding you, to take care of every physical need you had and your daddy was there by your side for comfort – whether you were aware of him or not. I struggled to understand how having me there could make any sort of difference to you, particularly when I had already failed you so many times before. I didn't even realise that I was continuing to do so by trying to keep my distance.

The truth is Emma at the end of the day the only person I really ended up hurting was myself.

We seemed to do ok, you and me. After that day with Mr Solis, I forced myself to try to let go of those fears or not to let them rule me as much as they had done before. I was still scared, I don't remember ever not being scared, but somehow I tried to keep pushing past it to enjoy the time that I got to spend with you each day.

Each day I would tease your daddy a little for his choice of lullaby, and we would mock argue over who would get to be the first to hold you each day as you grew stronger. You looked so small cradled against your daddy's chest – a man who was never shy about skin to skin or kangaroo care. I'm sure the other mum's would walk by just to admire him, but then who could blame them really. But I like to think that you settled more readily with me.

Me and daddy would talk too as we looked after you, as we watched you graduate to the lower levels of care as your strength increased. Things became much more easy between us, relaxed. We didn't quite reclaim what we used to have, but then perhaps it's better to look forward rather than going back. It was different this time, much slower. I suppose in your company we became friends, whereas before we had jumped straight to partners.

But there was one stumbling block. Daddy liked to discuss the future, and while I was comfortable looking a little bit ahead, I struggled to go much further than a few days. Daddy liked to joke about who you would grow up to be – that you could be a nurse just like him and how proud that would make him. I think he expected me to argue and say that no daughter of mine was to be a nurse, but instead I would shake my head and put an end to the conversation. Sometimes he would look less to the future, he'd talk about which one of us would be worse on your first day of school but still I would block the conversation. Though for the record the answer is daddy. He'd be flapping like a baggy kilt, while simultaneously trying, unsuccesfully, to prevent the tears rolling down his cheeks.

I couldn't let myself dream of a future, because I couldn't bear the idea of it being snatched away from us. You were growing stronger, and still I couldn't let myself believe. I loved you, more than I thought it was possible to love another person but still that fear made me hesitant. Each day I feared the more I gave in to the love, the more I had to lose and so I took each day, each moment and tried to live only for that. I could really only live in the present.

Do you see it Emma? Outside, right now, there's a red sky like the one on the night before you were born. It's 7:52am. Exactly 53 days from your birthday. Somewhere out there, someone is whispering "red sky in the morning shepherds warning" but we won't look at it like that, will we Emma? Instead we are going to admire the pretty colours, because they are there just for you.

My darling girl. There are so many words I long to say to you like I'm sorry (and I don't say that often) for failing you, for all of those things I didn't do and for all of those things that I did. I could write forever, talk forever, but it won't change things.

So for now we'll admire the pretty red sky, before you head for home and I'll say just one thing more.

I'll love you always,

Mum