Prequel

I’ve struggled with what to write about life before. It’s an important part of the story but the ability/desire/need to have children is both emotive and intensely personal.  My friends represent most viewpoints from revelling in motherhood to absolute refusal to have children because ‘I just don’t like them.’  That’s fine.  That’s perfectly fine because it is a choice.  It absolutely is a choice.  It is not for everyone and to be perfectly truthful, I had very wonderful times during my ‘child-free’ years.

The problem was that ultimately I would feel ‘childless’.  A strange sense that I was missing something started to take hold as all of my friends were showing off their shiny new babes.  Of course, this was compounded by my total inability to find a ‘decent’ chap.  According to my husband, this means a man who will return a phone call or reply to a text. Basically not that hard, or demanding really…

Thankfully, I did meet a man who returned phone calls and texts and married him for his novelty value – and his kindness, generosity of spirit, intelligence and amazing blue eyes.  I had the fairy tale white wedding and then the following year a house of my own!  And then it started – the questions and expectations from everyone.  ‘When?’ ‘Ooh, you know what’s next!’ Etc….

A very good and wise friend of mine once said that once you get over 35, no one should ask about when you are having children.  By then, you’ve either made a socially unpopular decision (I don’t think it’s wrong!) or something is wrong.  Sadly, for me, something was wrong.  I’m not going into details here. My uterus is my own!  It’s taken a long time to get used to this, to grieve for it, to accept it.  Part of me will always be a bit sad I think.

We carried on.  As my mum would say ‘it’s what you do.’  Being a teacher nearly always compounded the desperation and the desolation of not having my own child.  Kids are brilliant.  It is why I do my job.  However, they will invariably say ‘Miss, you’d be a great mum.’ So amazing to hear but so painful too.

Some of the things that happened during my lowest points of the last few years have been the funniest too. A black comedy of events looks back at me.  The nadir or high point of which had to be a devised A level piece which looked at surrogacy.  The piece took place inside giant uterus.  Everywhere were signs describing it as dangerous or out of order.  I walked into it with my boss. He squeezed my hand; we looked at each other; we burst out laughing.  I mean what else can you do when you are standing inside a giant you!! The piece was fantastic, by the way, and the girls did us, and themselves, very proud.

It was a very lonely time. People who knew were great but they all had children. They sympathised but they didn’t know. I felt surrounded by pregnant women.  It was challenging to both love them all dearly and envy them all so keenly.  Like so many people, I suffered greatly with this loss. I threw myself into work.  I began to experience panic attacks for the first time in my life.  I felt like a complete and absolute failure to my husband and, also, bizarrely, to my gender.  Deep down I really believed that I had to reproduce!  What an entirely irrational and ridiculous notion!!  I now have a much better sense of perspective.

Skipping ahead, there was much sadness, self-pity and grief but there was also another side.  Once the emotional cloud started to clear we planned, we talked, we went on holiday – a lot!  Adoption kept coming up. The more we talked, the more we realised that this was what we wanted.  We were ready.  A little bit of excitement started to bubble.  After all, there’s more than one way to start a family.