Today, I need to talk about children’s bottoms, and how ridiculously adorable they are.

Also their thighs, right where they meet the knee. And arms – at the elbows and wrists.

Basically all of the squidgy, pudgy, squeezable bits. I want to fill my hands, and my eyes and my soul with them.

This is probably partly because a friend of mine has had the perfect, rounded, deliciously chunky baby and OH MY GOD THE NAPPY BOTTOMS, how could I possibly have forgotten the solid, round, rightness of a nappy bottom???

It’s probably also because I don’t get to lay my hands on my children every day, and I’ve found that a lot harder than I thought I would.

Missing them isn’t just cerebral, it’s physical.

This need to squeeze really never happened to me before I had kids.

But I can remember the exact moment when it started – which was the exact moment the Big Small was placed on me, skin-to-skin, after my c-section. And I wanted to absorb her back into my body through my chest, and store up the imprint of her in my palms forever.

It was the very first time I’d felt love in my HANDS. (I imagine it’s the same feeling Queen Elsa gets when she’s making snow and ice). It’s a sort of fullness and emptiness all at once that can only really be relieved with touch.

Pre-kids, if I thought of children’s bottoms at all I would have been repulsed by the thought of anyone willingly wiping up another human being’s faeces direct from source.

How times change. And actually, it’s very hard to explain that change, and the physicality, the WEIGHT of that sort of love to someone who doesn’t have children.

It’s a hollowness that burns your palms, a swelling that flips your stomach, bulges your eyes, closes your throat, seizing you, freezing you – clenching everything inside for an expanding, throbbing, impossible, HUNGRY moment.

That probably makes no sense to you if you’re not a parent. And do you know what?

I’d have HATED that, before I had them.

That stupid, groundless disdain of the parent for the non-parent – like they have some smug secret to life or some level of feeling that you can’t possibly understand just because you’ve not squeezed a human being out of your nether regions. I mean, get over yourself.

But I look at them now, the whipper-snappers, the young folk around me, with their daily concerns and thought patterns and lives, and think, God, if only you KNEW.

And it made me think about the things that you really can’t pass on. The things that hold the human race back, because we cannot communicate them to the next generation. Not really. Things so weirdly universal, but that have to be experienced to be understood – really, truly understood. The need for experience is a very human burden, isn’t it?

Arrogantly, I thought it would be different with my own kids – something else that I could only learn the hard way. Because the truth is that as their parent you don’t really get to impart wisdom to them – in fact you are the last person they will hear. All you get to do really is to try SHOW them the way in your actions and reactions, and hope for the best. Because they will learn the biggest and hardest lessons their own way, as all people will do, for all time.

And I suppose one of the biggest and hardest lessons is love.

I will never be able to explain to my children the thunder of love that blocks my hearing and fuzzes my vision – his heavy mass of a thing I both long for and struggle with. They won’t know it unless or until they have their own children.

Love hurts, the saying goes. But no one ever told me how very palpable that hurt would be. Or that it wouldn’t necessarily be someone breaking my heart, but me labouring to carry it around so very full.

When it really overwhelms me, I will say to them, “Hey. Have I told you how much I love you today?” The Small Small will say “Yes!” and roll her eyes at me. The Big Small will always say “No” – slightly coyly – and make me say it again.

Some days I think love was my undoing.

Other days, I think it’s made me.

It has certainly made me lead by example – even when it’s been the very, very hardest thing I’ve ever done. I could not, for instance, let them grow up thinking love looked like the relationship I was in. I had to show them a better way.

But sometimes I worry, because I’m conscious that it is my burden to carry, and mustn’t weight them down or hold them back from the lives and experiences they deserve and NEED to live for themselves. Because, well, they’re people. Their own people. And as they get bigger they will be less and less mine to squeeze anyway.

We’ve been swimming a lot this half term. And in a swimming costume, it is obvious to me that the Small Small is really not so small any more. She is losing the squidgy bits. She is stretching out like her sister – a lean whippet of a girl whose body is all amazing muscle and sinew and LIFE that makes me marvel every time I see her dance or leap.

The babies that taught me what love was, are not babies anymore.

I think it’s okay to mourn that stage, especially at a time I’m still processing so much loss. Because even as I mourn it, I am learning to welcome the next stage.

At the pool, the Big Small pressed herself to me suddenly, and gripped me with an unabashed force I recognised, and said to me with shining eyes, “I think we’re the best family here.”

Later the same night, the Small Small, on the edge of sleep, cupped my face in her hands and squeezed and said, “Have I told you today that I love you?”

And I saw their easy expression of love, their joy in it, its depth and ferocity and purity. And I knew that they had learned that from me. By example.

And for the first time in a long time, love didn’t feel quite so heavy anymore.