Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

With Madeleine just three weeks old, I had to go back to work last week, part time. On the up-side, I find my colleagues to be rather cuddly.

Have you heard of the Capture the Colour competition? You post your travel pics in blue, green, yellow white and red, to potentially win prizes.

I love the theme of this competition, and the concept of storytelling that is to go along with the photos. So while my photographs are nothing special visually, I thought that just for fun, I'd use this idea to take myself (and you) on a little armchair journey through some old memories.

Steel blue water, blue sky and a blue warship, all reflected in the cool blue glass facades of Manhattan skyscrapers...

In 2009, two Australian warships HMA Sydney and HMA Ballarat sailed into New York as part of the centenary celebration of the Great White Fleet. I was lucky enough to be one of four Aussie journalists taken out by the US Coastguard to greet the frigates. I will never forget the early morning salt-slap of water against my face as we headed out to the mouth of the Hudson River; nor the surge of patriotic pride that took me completely by surprise as Sydney churned into view, white-clad officers lining her deck, and the strains of a band playing "Down Under" bouncing over the waves.

On a trek through the Sacred Valley in Peru, we came across this group of school children playing football. The players and the field appeared seemingly out of nowhere as we emerged from dense forest. What with the green field, the green mountains and the thick forest, it was as though these boys were playing inside a green globe, above, below and around.

I snapped this little fellow with his yellow truck, yellow striped mat and almost-yellow hair at the Lee Street fete in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year.

It was a poignant day for me. I was six months pregnant with my first baby, and Mr B and I had recently moved to Melbourne, the fourth state we'd lived in in less than a year and the fifth interstate move for me since I'd left New York only two years earlier. Finally we were settled, creating a home. And since the Lee Street school was where our little one would eventually go, we decided to visit to the fete. I think it was on this day that I really started to get clucky, and the reality of our baby-to-be sank in.

_The white sails of this yacht, and the white sea-foam created by our own yacht, stood out in wonderful contrast to sea, land and sky during a sunset cruise in Newport, Rhode Island (USA).

I had taken two weeks away from steamy August in New York and stayed in a B&B that was a 300 year-old rum runner's house overlooking Narragansett Bay. In between harbour cruises, I spent a lot of time visiting remote graveyards in the wilderness, researching the bizarre stories of vampires that plagued this corner of America as recently as 100 years ago.

A sea of red terracotta rooftops, curving away into the distance in the Old Town part of Nice, France.

This was taken during our family holidays last year. Everyone else had gone down to the beach, but I wanted some time out so I climbed alone up stone steps cut into a cliff, to a kind of belvedere lookout from what was once, so I read, a Celtic castle ruin. I remember the sensation that you could almost reach out your hand and touch the roof tiles, although they were actually very far away. I didn't know it at the time but I carried my baby with me on this climb, a tiny speck of a promise only a day or two old.

Part of the Capture the Colour initiative involves tagging five other bloggers who you think might want to take part. Finding five fabulous photographically-talented bloggers with a penchant for travel was easy. LIMITING the list to five was a lot tougher! Here they are:

Melissa of Press Play
Brandi of Not Your Average Ordinary
Deb of Bright and Precious
Katherine of Through My Looking Glass
Kate of Our Little Sins

Ladies, will you join me?

What does it feel like being a mother? Being Madeleine's mother is a whole new kind of love, something I couldn't ever have imagined, a love so powerful that it threatens to burst out of me at any moment, as though flesh and bones are not enough to contain it.

Also, it feels a bit like this. Especially the squeeze part in the middle.

Oh and also, Inkheart! (Huh? I'm writing for English Muse.)

I received this email recently from a woman who came across my novella Airmail in an East Berlin youth hostel. It just made my heart sing.

"I am staying at a youth hostel in East Berlin and stumbled across a copy of your book. I am a forty year-old woman traveling with my son, and readily identified with Mr Solomon's bemusement when he first enters the hostel (it was my first time staying at a hostel!)...

"Being forty this year was hard for me and I too am traveling and gathering more marbles. It's not so much that I haven't lived an adventuresome life, it's just that suddenly your life seems so much shorter while the list of things you want to do grows bigger, and you realize that you have spent the last 10 years of your life raising kids and working. (could this be what a mid-life crisis is all about......duh)

"It's amazing how at certain critical points in your life the right book or the right experience occurs. Your book is part of that for me. Today I walked past some graffiti on the side of a cafe - 'Life is not over yet' it read."

Wasn't that nice of this woman to write and tell me? I don't think there's anything that could make me happier as an author than to learn that my book was "the right book" in someone's life. Oh so happy.

Sometimes you just need a little positive energy in your life. A little hope, a glimpse of that light at the end of the tunnel. Wouldn't you agree?

I can't thank you enough for all your kindness and thoughts and prayers on this post. With all my heart I want to tell you how much reading your words in the comments has helped our family stay hopeful and think positive.

One day when Madeleine is older I will show her your comments so she can know that she was thought of and loved by friends and strangers alike throughout the world at a time when she (and her mama) truly needed it.

_You have never been so afraid.

Your daughter looks up at you from the crook in your right arm, makes a kissy face and then a smile and gurgles happily, pink and plump and blue-eyed. She is the picture of health. And though you try to fight them back, you feel the hot tears spill over your cheeks. They fall onto her upturned face and you wipe her dry, then tenderly stroke her soft hair.

You try to take it all in as the doctor talks on about the hole in her heart, the one that is half a centimetre wide, that is pumping blood into her lungs that shouldn’t be there. Your precious baby girl. She is only 17 days old, how can you protect her?

“Probable,” he says. Probable is the word he chooses to describe the likelihood that your tiny baby will need to undergo open-heart surgery in six to eight weeks. There is a moment in which you think you are going to be sick but instead you bring up a sob that is as hard as stone, and drop more silent tears onto your daughter's little face. “Although she might surprise us,” the doctor adds.

When you get home she cries and cries, over-tired and overwrought, so you swallow your own tears to try and comfort hers. Eventually, her dad sings her to sleep. You tip-toe into the room and look over her as she slumbers, her face relaxed and lovely, her dreams trouble-free.

But everything has changed. The joy you felt this morning from watching her sleep is gone. Now you know that underneath that peaceful face, those eyelashes that softly quiver, is her traitor’s heart, a heart that even now is pumping blood where it shouldn’t go, pulling your daughter into danger.

You wonder how you can ever be normal for her, in the days and weeks to follow, while there is nothing to do but watch and wait.

I wrote the piece above yesterday after returning home from the hospital with Madeleine's diagnosis ("ventricular septal defect" is the official term), as a way to express the grief that overwhelmed me.

I wrote it in the second person because I just couldn't stand any closer to the fear. I didn't call my friends or tell a soul, because I couldn't (and still can't) talk about it. So my words on here will have to do instead.

But I want to end this post on a more positive note, with the double rainbow that stretched overhead like protective arms around our family when we took a walk together on the weekend.

There is good reason for us to have hope, among the fear. We discovered the defect in time, thanks to the vigilance of one of the midwives at our maternity hospital who picked up an anomaly the very night our baby was born. We have one of the best health systems in the world, and Madeleine's care will be limitless and free, thanks to our tax dollars at work. All three cardiac surgeons at the children's hospital are world class, and each performs this operation on babies several times a week. And after her operation, Madeleine will be well. No suffering. No more danger.

Yesterday I let grief take me. Just for one day. Now I will be positive and full of that hope, because that is what my little girl needs.

While we watch for symptoms to appear and wait for the operation she will most likely have to have, I will dedicate my hours to giving her love, making her laugh, ensuring she feels safe, and dreaming about her future.