As the hospital hummed with antiseptic quiet and Kathy's fingers gripped mine, I thought about how strange it was to be there at the very beginning of someone's life — a baby who was both mine and not mine.But let's start back in 2019, when I was faced with a decision to have a baby of my own with one of my partners, and I decided not to.I've always loved babies and kids — I had lots of younger cousins growing up, and my first job as a teenager was babysitting the kids down the road.Yet having a kid of my own at the time didn't feel right for me Partly because babies meant a partner and sex (nope!) and partly because she's a primary school teacher, and that's enough kids to deal with on the daily.But accompanying me on my reproductive journey flicked a switch for Kathy — what became visible, became possible.I'd been thinking about what it might mean to hold a child who isn't mine.As a non-binary person, the label "maternal" fit me like a left shoe on a right foot, while "paternal" made me seasick.Still, the pull was undeniable.Kathy and I spent months planning what it would look like for me to move back to Perth/Boorloo from Melbourne/Naarm for the first six months of my nibling's life (for those who haven't heard of this term, nibling is a non-gendered combination of niece or nephew with sibling, i.e