[ WP ] During their lifetime , every person can only say each word exactly once .

A mother should n't have favourites, should she? 
 
 Maybe I'm just not a very good mother. 
 
 When he was born, when Jake was born, perfect and small and pink, eyes screwed up and wrinkled like he'd just come out from the bath, and I told him I loved him before he was a minute old. 
 
 He could n't understand what I meant and he cried at the shock- of my voice, of his first breathe, of this cold, new world? But I said it and a door was closed to me forever and when I gave birth to Eve two years later, they stuck in my throat and I held her and cried. 
 
 When Eve was five months old and finally, finally, diagnosed with a rare congenital defect, a defect which skipped Jake and instead landed on her, my daughter, and stole her future away, I could n't hold her and sob how she was still perfect and always would be perfect and never could not be perfect, because I'd told my mum how perfect her toes, her ten little toes, so small, so new, were, in a rush of love and hormones. It would n't have mattered then, to her, she was five months old and by then half death but she was fitted with a cochlear implant two years later and when she took days off school for appointments and did n't understand why she was so terrible at sports, I could n't tell her how special and wonderful and *perfect* she was. 
 
 When Jake was nine, he broke his arm and I held him at A & E and I wanted to tell him it was all going to be fine, all going to be okay, but I'd used those words on Eve's regular hospital visits and every permutation of the word okay, or fine, so I felt the lump in my throat and I squeezed his hands and he could n't even tell me he was hurting because he could n't get those words out, because every toddler had cried for their mother, cried how they were hurt, at least once. 
 
 Basic words are used up quickly. Mum, Mummy, Mom, Mother. Names are words but apparently they don't- do n't count? I'm not sure how it works. It takes some time for words to become *words*. I invented words as a child and repeated them to myself often until I could n't and I felt so proud, because now the universe had decided that alapolozi had meaning. Somehow I'd twisted the rules of the universe to fit me. 
 
 We learn and invent words all the time as a result. We write and text and choose our words carefully, I suppose. It is gravity, it is a fact, a law, something we ca n't change and have always known. When I said I loved my little son, I meant it with all my life and heart and everything, but my emotions and hormones and feelings did n't follow the laws of the universe apparently and so instead of saying I love my children or my husband, I have to hug or kiss them, and instead of cutting, hurtful remarks, I learnt to hold my tongue. 
 
 I'd like my children to tell me now much they loved me and for my husband to repeat our wedding vows and for me to read the same stories to my children more than once without pausing to think of new synonyms. But I treasure each and every word when I say them.
