I know the pain Prince Harry will feel – to become a parent when your mum is gone brings the grief flooding back

Whatever you think about the royal family, they are not spared the raw emotions that can swirl around you at a moment like this

Prince Harry has proudly shown his new son to the world, paid tribute to his “amazing” wife and headed off to show the baby to his grandmother, the Queen. Amid the joy of the moment, I should think, he is also feeling the bittersweet sense of loss in becoming a parent without a parent.

It takes becoming a parent to fully appreciate your own and as Harry looks at his new son, there will be many moments when his mother, Diana, comes powerfully to mind.

I lost my beloved mum four years before the arrival of our first born. I thought I’d processed the grief but felt the searing sense of loss all over again in the first few months after the birth of our son.

I had no idea about the blood, sweat and tears that bringing a child into the world involved. To have been able to share Charlie’s arrival with my mother would have been a deeply happy coda to the birth. Instead, her absence made me miss her more than ever.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask her. What was it like being in labour with me? How long did it take? Who did I look like? How easy or difficult was it to breastfeed? I’d never really thought about these things until then and it was all I could think about for those first few months.

When Harry paid tribute to his wife and womankind – “how any woman does what they do is beyond comprehension” – I was wondering how heavy that burden might be for him, how his thoughts would turn to what Diana must have endured when he was born. Harry was just 12 when she died. Few boys of that age have pestered their parents for details of their birth.

I was born in a maternity home and one story my mother did tell me was about how the midwives had taken me away and put me in the cot in a roomful of other babies so she could get some rest. She told me how she’d crept out and picked me up and brought me back into bed with her. She got told off, but kept going back anyway.

I thought of that story after Charlie was born and how she would have felt holding me, and my siblings before me, in her arms. I so wanted to tell her “I get it now. I’m sorry I didn’t understand before.”

The Duchess of Sussex appears to be very close to her own mother, Doria, and has reportedly moved her into Frogmore Cottage. But this is barely a consolation.

When we had Charlie, it was the first grandchild for my husband’s mother too and, helpful as she was, her presence only exacerbated the void my own mother had left. One adoring grandparent only serves as a painful reminder.

Whatever you think about the royal family, they are not spared the raw emotions that can swirl around you at a moment like this, when relief, happiness and grief commingle and when the paradoxical joy of becoming a parent without a parent is universal.