Why I wrote a pregnancy bonding book before my son arrived

Before I was a mother, I was a reader.

That is where everything starts, really. Long before Ian, long before the bump, long before the years of hoping and waiting and finally arriving at the thing I had wanted so badly, there were books. Growing up, life was not easy. I will not go into the details here, but I will say that books were the place I could go when everything else felt too heavy or too loud. The library was my paradise. I would devour anything, history, biography, romance, literature. I did not have a type. I just had hunger. And somewhere inside all of that reading, I started writing too. Poetry mostly, and stories, and long letters that other people would sign their names to and send. Words were the thing I kept coming back to, long before I understood why.

So when I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I wanted to do, obviously, was find a book.

Not for me. For him. For the little person growing there, already hearing things, already feeling the warmth of a hand pressed against a belly, already building a relationship with the world outside without even knowing it. Science confirms what every pregnant woman already knows in her body: the baby inside can hear your voice. They learn it. They recognise it. And if you repeat the same words enough times, those words become something familiar, something that will feel like home the moment they hear it again on the other side.

I wanted to give Ian that. A book we could read together, the three of us, me and Ivan and the bump, over and over, building something before he even arrived. Words he would carry with him without knowing he was carrying them.

I looked everywhere. And I could not find what I was looking for.

There were plenty of books about pregnancy. About bodies and babies and what to expect. There were books with beautiful illustrations and soft colours and gentle messages. But what I was looking for was something specific and I could not find it anywhere. I wanted a book that spoke directly to the little one inside. Not about pregnancy in general. Not to the parents. To him. A book that said: I know you are there. I know you can feel this. I know you can hear me. A book that a mother could pick up every night and read with her whole heart, building a ritual, a language, a warmth that the baby would recognise the moment they arrived.

That book did not exist. So eventually, I wrote it.

Not during the pregnancy. After. Ian was here, just weeks old, and the idea that had been sitting with me finally turned into something I could not ignore. I thought about every mama out there searching for exactly what I had searched for and not finding it. I thought about the ritual I had wanted and never had. And I wrote it for her. For them. For all of us.

That book is called Not Yet, But Already Ours.

It is a book about the love that begins before birth. About the bond that builds in the dark, before names and faces and tiny fingers curled around yours. It is a book to read aloud, repeatedly, as a ritual, so that by the time those words reach your baby in the world, they already sound like home.

Because that is what this love is. It is loving someone you have never seen. Never touched. Someone who starts as the tiniest seed, who looks nothing like a person yet and everything like yours, who grows arms and a head and legs while you watch an app tell you what size fruit they are this week, and somehow, impossibly, they are already your whole world.

You would do anything for them. You already would. And you have not even met them yet.

That is the bond this book was written for. The one that exists before the beginning. The one that has no name yet, because the person you feel it for has not told you theirs. Not yet. But already, completely, and with everything you have, they are yours.