She had been filled with blissful contentment, watching her belly swell. A sign that her love had not been misplaced, a thing to be discarded or lay waste but instead a precious gift. It was with thoughts such as these, that the woman made her decision and shortly after found herself moving to a new home overlooking the sea.

Her days were filled with the joyful musings of a woman in love with motherhood. She set about making a welcoming place for baby's arrival and when too tired to do more she rocked in the rocking chair, crocheting a baby shawl.

She decided it would be best to keep the pending arrival quiet, she didn't know anyone in the small seaside town and thought she might like to keep it that way, at least to begin with.

From the ipod tower soft music played while the last-minute preparations were completed, including the basin for hot towels. All night the woman toiled at natures bidding. At some point in the early hours of the morning she realised she had yet to select a name for the baby but all thoughts were abandoned during the final delivery. A healthy-looking baby girl arrived, 6.08am according to the digital clock that illuminated the corner of the darkened birthing suite.

Mother and baby slept much of that first day.

After that neither slept for weeks.

The baby was always upset and the woman struggled with her love for it. She nursed it, she cradled it, she sang to it and tended to its every need but to no avail. All she received in response were the horrific screams of a newborn babe, until the newborn was seven weeks old.

Then in the early hours of the morning, the baby stopped screaming.

And the woman slept.

But her sleep was interrupted around 6:08am, when the wailing sound of a newborn awoke her.

The woman was terrified, there was no sign that the baby had been disturbed from where she had earlier been put to rest.

The all too familiar cries continued.

They never stopped.

The woman tried to drown the sound out in the shower and with the bedding pulled over her ears while she cringed in the corner of her room. She screamed the screams of a madwoman of a desperate soul, and the reflection in the mirror no longer recognized her, now with unkept flaxen hair, more akin with a bird's nest, the eyes swollen and red rimmed.

Until the woman was spent and couldn't listen anymore to the wailing sound.

In the early hours of the morning the woman walked while cradling a baby in a shawl she had crocheted for its welcomed delivery. It was cold and lifeless, an innocent. The mother walked towards the water that she could hear crashing against the rocks below the clifftop.

She continued to walk until there was no more ground beneath her feet and the cries of the baby were drowned.