Dear friend,
Ten winters ago, I announced to my boyfriend I wanted us to try for a baby. We’d been together over two years, I’d passed my 40th birthday, and it felt like now or never. Except having spent much the previous decade struggling with a chronic health condition, while soldiering on at a demanding job, my boyfriend wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about my suggestion. Now his health had finally improved, he wanted to enjoy life again, which meant weekends hanging out with me drinking cocktails and going to the movies, or spending time on his great passion, photography. Not broken nights and a 24 hour cycle structured around the beat of feeds and nappy changes.
I’d been on the fence about having kids. Wanting them, but never right now, and always in some nebulous future, where I pictured myself cuddling a peaceful baby. Of course, I knew the reality of parenthood was far more multi-dimensional. Not least as, having left it this late, I’d watched most of my friends become mothers, and seen how much it had changed their lives. In ways that were amazing, yet also challenging. So along with being curious and excited at the prospect of bringing a child in the world, I was terrified. Terrified of the changes motherhood would wreak upon almost every aspect of my life, from my sleep to my freedom to my body and my relationship.
Throughout my thirties, during which I was mostly single, it never crossed my mind to become a parent alone. The urge simply wasn’t strong enough. It was something I envisaged doing alongside a partner, and meeting the right person was, for me, more important than becoming a mother. Even once he finally arrived, I darted back and forth between wanting and not wanting.
One blue-skied December morning in 2012, I was walking to a medical appointment: an annual scan to check the breast cancer I’d had at thirty-one hadn’t reared its head again. On my way, I passed a local coffee shop. An acquaintance was sitting outside, his new baby in his arms. We stopped to chat, and after I’d admired his baby, he asked me if I wanted kids. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Do it,’ was his response. ‘It’s the best thing ever.’
It was one of life’s pivot moments. I decided that if my MRI scan was clear, I would have the conversation with my boyfriend.
Except it didn’t quite go as planned. But, after a few weeks of discussion, he – semi-reluctantly – agreed we’d give it a go. Perhaps he thought it might never happen, given I was over 40 and given we were, at the time, in a long-distance relationship, as he was working in Germany.
Days after we’d made our decision, he texted me on a Friday morning in late January, to say he was leaving for the airport soon, to catch a flight back to London, and looked forward to seeing me later. I pictured the relaxed weekend that lay ahead: dinner with friends on Saturday night and not much else.
A few minutes later, my mother phoned me: my ten-month-old nephew had had in a one-in-a-million accident. He was dead.
This was inconceivable. The magnitude of his loss, foremost. But also because it was a loss I’d never considered likely. My head had been full of thoughts on the challenge of getting pregnant in the first place and of making it past the first trimester – not least because quite a few friends had struggled. In my mind, once your baby arrived in the world, the odds were they’d stay.
I’m very close to my mother and I’d shared my desire for a baby with her. In the weeks and months that followed my nephew’s death, she started to tell me every story she heard or read about something going wrong, be it a stillbirth, a late miscarriage or a cot death. It was her way of trying to protect me – and, indeed, all my family – from more loss.
I’d respond by saying, of course terrible things can happen. But they are, thank goodness, rare. I’d remind her that the majority of women who make it past their first trimester end up with a baby who goes on to become an adult and outlives their parents. Yet behind my rational brain, lurked a fear that something could, indeed, go very wrong. After all, there was no reason why lighting couldn’t strike twice.
Yet, alongside my rational thoughts and my fear, was a third current: hope. And hope is, of course, risky. By daring to hope, and taking action towards bringing what we long for into existence, we also risk disappointment. Life, as we know, doesn’t always go to plan. But the alternative, of remaining trapped under an avalanche of fears that shout about all the things that could go wrong, means we risk not experiencing the expansion and joy of getting what we long for.
Hope invites us to reach into the world with arms wide open, knowing there are no guarantees, and that the route forward can be steep at times. But, equally, knowing that life, with all its wild possibilities, can also surprise us in wonderful and unexpected ways: perhaps we fall in love with someone very different to the kind of person we pictured ourselves with, or we meet the child we longed for through adoption, rather than the effortless conception we’d envisaged. And we live knowing that at least we tried.
Hope kept me walking forwards, month after month. And on a spring morning in 2018, she expanded, as two strong lines finally appeared in the tiny window of a white plastic stick.
Some weeks later, on a sunny Saturday in late May, I walked into University College Hospital in central London. I’d not been into the building since that terrible January morning five years previously. Then, I was taken into the seclusion of a family room on the ground floor, where I got to see my beautiful nephew for the final time, his heartbeat extinguished forever.
This time, I walked upstairs, and into a waiting room teeming with other women whose bellies pulsated with the promise of new life. Eventually, it was my turn to be seen. The sonographer spread cool gel across my abdomen and began to glide her probe across my skin. I held my breath as she fixed her eyes on her screen. Then our silence was broken by the thump-thump-thump of a tiny beating heart.
Love,
Annabel
Beautiful writing and story Annabel - thank you so much for sharing.
This made me cry in all the ways it's beautiful and important to cry. For loss and love. And for the hope which returns loss to love again and again. Thank you for living your life with such open-hearted courage, and for sharing it with us with such grace.