Brenda Couvee's two children, Fane (left) and Mercedes, know that Gloria exists and is special. Picture / Peter Meecham

Brenda Couvee's two children, Fane (left) and Mercedes, know that Gloria exists and is special. Picture / Peter Meecham

It is one of the most selfless acts a woman can make. MICHELE HEWITSON Michele Hewitson speaks to a woman who knows what it's like to give the gift of life.

Early this year Brenda Couvee got a thank-you card. It read: "Words can't express the joy that you have brought into our lives. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts ... "

It's the sort of card that brings tears of happiness to the eyes of mums all over the country, the sort of card that makes up for all the nappies, the crayoned walls, the tantrums.

Couvee, sitting in a cafe attached to the big flash Ascot Hospital in Ellerslie, is having a little cry over her flat white. It's the sort of moment the makers of such cards would love to capture.

Couvee is feeling a bit embarrassed. Sorry, she says, for "being a wimp about it".

It's not just the card that's done it. It's a snapshot of a newborn baby surrounded by what appears to be the contents of an entire florist's shop and half a toy shop. It is a portrait of a much-wanted baby.

The odd thing about this - if odd is the right word, and it wouldn't be Couvee's word - is that the much-wanted baby in the photos is not Couvee's, although she very much wanted it to be born.

And despite the card carrying a happy Mother's Day wish, it didn't actually arrive on Mother's Day.

Nor did it come from Couvee's two children. At almost 6 and almost 3, they're smart kids, she says with pride. But the joined-up writing, and expression of the sentiments, are a little beyond the reach of even the smartest 6-year-old.

Later in the day we're at Potter's Park with Couvee's two children: Fane and Mercedes. I want to ask them who they think the baby in that photo is; they want to pat a madly barking dog (they're not allowed) and go up the ladder and down the slide and round and round on the whirligig.

Fortunately it's a short line of questioning. "Who's Gloria?" I ask Fane who, at nearly 6, might know. "She's a baby," he laughs because it's obviously a silly question. "Where did Gloria come from?" "Someone's tummy," he says with authority.

"Oh, he does know more than that," Couvee says.

Gloria is not the real name of the baby in the picture. Her identity is protected, as is the identity of her parents. Brenda Couvee, 33, is the woman who donated the egg that made Gloria's existence possible.

It's a story that started where this one did, or almost: at Ascot Hospital's Fertility Associates clinic, which looks, deliberately, as little like a medical clinic as possible. It feels more like the lobby of a small boutique hotel, with its floral arrangements, and art-hung walls. You would be hard-pushed to find a doctor's name on a door or that cliched prop of fertility treatment, the test tube.