All too soon, we're at our final Mother Words essay. Thanks so much to Kate Hopper and her writing class for sharing them with us. Until next time, here's...

Nesting By Emily Myers

I pace the hardwood floor in the darkness.

There are no curtains yet. Reflected light from cars and traffic signals slide around the walls, left and right as drivers move through the night.

My newborn son is in my arms. My husband sleeps next to us.

It is a new home for us, hastily inhabited; there are still boxes from the move in cupboards that don't close. We are in a new city, a new country, a new continent, a new life. I've left the world of journalism behind to embrace this new realm of motherhood.

But I'm still haunted by some of the stories I've covered. Children lost, abused, brutal boyfriends, neglectful mothers, mothers who said they just couldn't cope. What makes me so different?

I've been a mother for just five days. Somewhere I've read that if the screaming is too much, it's good to take a shower. There certainly is screaming, but it seems I can soothe my son, for now at least. I stare down at his tiny face, his rabbit soft hair, his lips blistered from nursing, so peaceful, so fragile, and so fresh to the world. I tell myself I have never held such a vulnerable being, never been depended upon so utterly. Then I catch my reflection in the dark windowpane.

It was some years ago, a day in early March, I think. We had a roof terrace in that apartment, which you could access through a sash window halfway up the stairs. It wasn't an arduous climb, but it involved a high leg kick and some strength in your arms.

We were on the third floor. Noisy double-deckers shifted gears outside the bedroom window, but on the terrace side it was quiet, overlooking the gardens. I had put down squares of decking and there was enough room for a folding chair and a potted plant. Stuffed in a corner there was a bag of compost, a few empty plant containers and a pair of pruning shears.

One day, when I could see fresh green shoots on the brittle hydrangea branches, I climbed outside to sit in the sunshine. Perched high above my neighbors, I watched the old man, shirtless, tending his immaculate lawn, and the woman who'd had polio singing to her cat. After a few minutes there was a scuttling sound behind me.

"A rat!" I thought. I leapt up and began clambering back through the window. I knocked over the chair and made enough noise to scare the blackbirds off the roof. Back in the apartment I caught my breath and peered out again, wondering if the intruder was still there.

Nestled on some gardening gloves, in a plastic flowerpot, I saw it. A mangy looking pigeon. "Only a pigeon," I exhaled deeply.

The bird viewed me from it's quarters, beady eyed and severe. From behind the glass, I tried to shoo it out of it's newly adopted home. I tapped the window and made the kinds of noises I'd made when I was younger, beating through bracken trying to put up pheasants when my father went shooting: "Eye, eye, eye, eye, eye."

There are plenty of pigeons in the city, scabby grey things with mangled feet and beaks blunt from pecking on the pavement. This was no rare breed and I didn't fancy it making a home in my spare room. I grabbed a broom to give it a poke through the open window. It didn't want to budge, but I was determined to get it airborne and with a few more prods it shifted uncomfortably and took reluctantly to the sky. I climbed back onto the terrace to see that it had left behind a shabbily made nest of sticks and feathers. As I stood there, I could also see the reason for the bird's steel-eyed stubbornness: eggs, white ones, a pigeon pair.

I have a friend who is effortlessly chic, highly efficient and utterly organized. It was this friend who called me as I was thinking what to do with the issue of the pigeon nursery on my roof terrace.

"It might be quite sweet to watch them hatch in a few weeks time," I said.

"Hatch?" She was evidently disgusted.

"You want pigeons coming back to breed on your terrace? That's what they'll do, you know? They always return to the place where they were born."

"Oh, no, I don't want that."

She'd won me over in one concise argument. "Pigeons carry diseases, don't they?" I asked.

"Well you'll have pigeon shit all over your roof terrace."

I could already smell the pungent fungal droppings. It was decided. I made enough noise to keep mom away and climbed back out of the window. The eggs were still warm. I cupped them in my hands. I couldn't bring myself to break them but I put them gently in their new nest among the musty potato peelings of my kitchen trash.

Then my brother called. I told him what I'd done and his words chilled me.

"A mother is a mother, Emily."

Neither of us were parents in those days. I appealed to him with the disease, shit, annual breeding arguments but he didn't shift position.

Even then, I was a little unnerved by the violence I had so dispassionately carried out. And now, in the darkness, my son's body rises and falls with my breath and I wonder how different we are, that pigeon and I, both trying to piece together a home, both trying to raise a family.

Sunrise is pulling at the blanket of darkness outside. Another night has become day. My reflection in the window fades.

I hold a life in my hands and recognize I did so before, above that dirty bus route, and I was found wanting.

Emily Myers graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Masters in English Literature. She worked as a journalist for the BBC for six years before moving to San Francisco in 2006. She lives there with her husband and 2 children and blogs sporadically at happydayyou.blogspot.com