I turn on my side and close my eyes, try to block out their cheery voices, but they grow louder.

People often talk about emptiness but I don’t think I have ever truly felt it, not really. Before, emptiness was an abstract concept, a throwaway phrase that fitted everything from the state of the fridge to the silence of the house on a weekday morning. Nothing could prepare me for this kind of emptiness, the raw, exposed state I’m living through now.

I have nothing. I am nothing. I would doubt I even exist, if it weren’t for the sensation of warm breath escaping in and out of my mouth. I remember the reading Sean and I had at our wedding: ‘Love is what makes us real’. I chose it because I liked the way the words sounded, the romantic, youthful undertones. I never really thought about what it truly meant, when you strip it down to its bare bones, though now I’m coming close.

Elspeth and Sean made me real. They were the hands that held me aloft, the air that transformed me from a loose bit of plastic into a buoyant balloon. Without them I don’t exist.

As I lie here, pressing my hands to my ears to block out the visitors’ happy chatter, I think back to the moment I gave birth to Elspeth. The midwife said it would feel like an expulsion. ‘You’ll never forget that sensation,’ she’d said afterwards. ‘That emptiness.’

I know what she meant but that wasn’t emptiness, nothing close to it. The vacant space in my womb had been replaced with an eight-pound-six-ounce bundle of baby who took up permanent residence in my arms. The muscles of my right arm became firm and taut with the weight of her head resting on it. My breasts were full to the brim with milk, so heavy that sometimes I feared I would topple over. The house, that had seemed too big at first, sprang to life, each room stuffed with Moses baskets, changing stations, Bumbo chairs, cuddly toys and nappies. Elspeth filled Larkfields to the rafters. With her arrival it transformed from house to home. Life was so busy there was no spare time to think. Sean left the house at seven each morning, kissing me on the cheek as I gave Elspeth her first feed of the day. When he came home we were both so shattered from our respective labours we’d eat dinner on our laps in the living room, sometimes even in bed. My brain was baby shaped, every inch of it consumed with Elspeth, her feeding times, her temperature, her targets. There was no room for any other concern. My life was a well-fed stomach, full and fat and sated.