I never wanted children. Not what you’d expect a parent to admit. (Especially one who wants her job to be writing for kids). But it’s true.

I’d got it all sorted out, aged fifteen, sat in Debenham’s coffee shop after school with my Mum. There must have been something particularly final about my wedge of chocolate cake, the thick seam of icing going hard, because I suddenly realised. Ok, I was going to die. So all I could do was face my death will as much courage as I could, and never inflict it on anyone else.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I was one of those teenagers.

Life loves to make fifteen-year-olds look silly. I’m still one of those teenagers, only with more frown lines, and my unexpected gift of a daughter, who has taught me things my fifteen-year-old self could never know.

One of them is this. There is nothing surer than the love I’ve been given for my daughter. Now it’s here, this love, it cannot ever un-be, no matter what happens to me, or to her. It’s a subatomic fact. I could go under a tube train, or lose every last one of my marbles to Alzheimer’s. I could get so sad I have to let the world go, or give in to pneumonia on the geriatric ward. It doesn’t matter a bit. Beneath the human realities of day-to-day life, the tiredness and tempers and the battle to pass on only the good things, there is a foreverness that is none of my doing.

And hey, this is just my stumbled-across turn-up-for-the-books. I don’t believe for a second it’s anything innate to parenthood. I don’t think that just because you’ve spawned yourself, you get a special insight into anything. Except maybe the value of sleep.

In fact, kids, or no kids: it’s kind of irrelevant.  The buck of mortality can never just stop with you, because a good life is woven into other lives. There’s the family tree you’re born into, and beyond this, you grow your own branches. 

Before you know it, there are the people you love, and the people you love on their behalf. A city of the heart, that you want to keep safe. The impossible prayer: please, not them. The blood you’d daub on the lintels, so that the angel of death would pass them over. Not this house. Please. But love is useless to stop the inevitable; this bizarre gift of existence must be snatched back.

A good life is a heavy one, pressed deep into the lives of others. A good life is more than yours to bear. It ripples out with meaning: home-grown raspberries in a stranger’s fridge, a face bright with joy at a winter party, a door knocked on a week too early. It’s all the arms that held you as a baby; all the babies you have held in yours. The weight of a good life can be unbearable, when black wings brush against the door.

Fifteen-year-old me was right to realise that being here isn’t something to pass on lightly. But she was wrong about the burden we’re born with. It isn’t death. Rather, it’s the heavy business of living itself, the Russian-doll sequence of love within pain within love. At times it can be almost impossible to tell which is which.

I think of the truth I nearly never knew. My something begun, that had always been there. I tell my daughter that we are never sure how much time we have; that the most important thing is to be as kind as possible, while we are here. Underneath this, something I’ll save for later. At the end, all you can do is gather up your useless love. Make it the place you furl yourself into, your last cry in the dark.