Letter to the longed-for children I never had
Countless words have been written about the agony of childlessness. But few so raw as this author’s . . .
Dear You
My darling children, this isn’t the first time i’ve written to you. i last poured out my feelings to you when you would have been eight and six.
i filled two sides of a4 paper, a letter full of love and wonder, detailing the life i planned to share with you.
now you are in your 20s, i want to write again. There will be some who say this letter is an indulgence, but i want to acknowledge just how much you still mean to me.
Most importantly, i want to tell you again how i longed to hear you call me ‘Mummy’. Because, my children, while i have imagined you so clearly over the years, we are never to meet.
despite years of ‘trying’, drugs, surgery and iVF, my dreams of motherhood have had to remain just that — dreams. But i still feel so much love for you, even though there is nowhere for it to go.
in particular, i feel i’m writing to you, lily, the beautiful daughter i would have named after my maternal grandmother; you would now be 27.
if life had gone the way i’d wanted it, i would also be writing to at least one son, maybe two.
i’m not sure what names we would have given you, but i used to imagine holding your squashy little bodies, breathing in your scent, and feeling your oh-so-soft skin against mine.
i’d picture your tiny hands, toes and noses and imagine your giggles and the little clothes i’d have dressed you in.
now i think of you getting your first job, your first flat. Falling in love. Sharing a glass of wine on a warm summer’s evening with your proud old Mum.
like any woman who desperately wanted to be a mother, but who finds herself reaching menopause without children, i experienced profound grief. When i couldn’t get pregnant, we tried iVF. When that didn’t work it was shattering. i wept big, howling, fat tears.
My Body had failed yet again. Months later, when the second attempt failed, i wanted to crawl away and hide. Sadly, my inability to bring you into the world gave me life membership to a club i never wanted to join — the childless women’s club.
Membership has enabled me to see clearly how motherhood is venerated in a society where the child is king and the childless left to feel … well … ‘less’.
if childlessness attracted as much respect as motherhood, and women were encouraged to realise (as i know now) that life can be rewarding and enjoyable without children, perhaps women like me might not become fixated with being a mummy over all else.
We might find it easier to accept and move on. More marriages might survive. We childless are casually made to feel like secondclass citizens, largely out of thoughtlessness, i think, not spite.
How angry have i been when i heard sentences that began ‘now that i am a parent i do/feel/see X differently.’ it suggests that a woman has greater empathy once she becomes a mother, but, of course, the implication is that a non-mother must therefore feel less.
i weep just as much as any mother when i see a drowned refugee child on television, or other images of innocents caught up in the world’s horrors.
an untimely death is always viewed as more tragic if it’s a parent. of course there are children to consider and more people grieving. But there is no escaping the message: the life of a childless person is worth less — and that can be hard to accept.
The casual cruelties are everywhere. Take the fashionable new term ‘mumpreneur’. That suggests you have achieved something particularly amazing, because you have built a business and brought up children, too.
When you don’t have a family of your own you notice the taboo that surrounds childlessness — i don’t even talk about it with those childless couples in my social circle. if i do tell people i’m infertile they often respond with embarrassment, as if they’ve discovered a dirty secret.
i’m sure many who meet me assume i simply never wanted children, or perhaps that i don’t even like them.
My darling children, if only they knew how i still think of you and love you, they’d know that couldn’t be further from the truth.
your father and i started trying for you four years after we married in July 1985. We’d met at university and our friendship deepened into a relationship after we both started working in london.
i didn’t delay starting a family for my career. your father worked for a bank and i was an events manager for a charity when, at 28, the time seemed right to come off the Pill. of course, i took it for granted that we’d be able to conceive. doesn’t everyone? it did happen once, after six months of trying. The blue line was faint, but definitely there.
That would have been you, darling lily. i popped champagne in the fridge — my last alcoholic drink for many months — but by lunchtime
my period started. We kept ‘trying’ and after a year with no sign of you, I was referred to a gynaecologist for investigations. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (my periods had always been erratic) that meant I wasn’t ovulating properly. For the next four years I faced a legion of scans, procedures, blood tests, operations, injections and drugs.
One study suggests couples who go through failed fertility treatment are three times more likely to split up than couples who go on to have a baby. I’m not surprised.
I became focused on one thing — you, my babies, and it wasn’t healthy for me or my marriage.
I am ashamed to admit it now but the treatment was so all-consuming that attention to your father’s needs and his suffering was not my priority. I knew at times he felt lost and helpless, watching me endure all sorts of procedures.
He was always kind and supportive. If I’m honest, I’m not sure I was the same to him — which I regret now.
Almost every part of our lives was affected by the pursuit of a child, from ensuring I never drank alcohol when we socialised, just in case, to where we lived — a perfect family house five minutes from a primary school.
At one point I was even massaging my belly daily with a concoction of clary sage and fennel essential oils after I read that it would cure polycystic ovary syndrome.
I suppose it’s not too inappropriate to confess to you that our love life suffered, as it became ever-more prescriptive and desperate. By the time I embarked on IVF at the Portland Hospital, after three years of waiting for you to appear, I had not just scaled down my work, but stopped altogether to concentrate on treatment.
Looking back, it would have been much healthier to have maintained a normal routine.
It would have given me some much-needed perspective. I can’t say anyone ever sold me false hope — though a recent study reveals that clinics often cherry-pick results they disclose and only half reveal the percentage of live births they achieve.
But the very nature of fertility treatment encourages you to think if you try just a bit harder, just a bit longer, your dreams of motherhood will be realised. This year marks 40 years since Louise Brown’s mother embarked on the first IVF pregnancy and there have been incredible advances in science since then.
Not having a man in your life, or even a womb, is no bar to motherhood now.
Obviously this is wonderful for those incredible, against-all-odds success stories, but part of me believes perceptions are altered, making it even harder for women to accept when it doesn’t happen for them.
In the end, after almost five years of trying, my attempts to have you came to an abrupt end, not by my choice but when your father had had enough. He told me that he didn’t feel our relationship was right for children.
Though I didn’t want to admit it, he had a point. By now, when we weren’t arguing we sat in ugly, sulky silences. I hoped it was just a bad patch, but a month later he moved out ‘for some space.’ Six weeks after that he admitted to me he had met someone new.
HIS words were like a sharp blow to my stomach. I asked if he loved her and if the sex was good. I begged him not to get her pregnant.
Of course, his revelation turned my world upside down.
I mourned the loss of my partner, as well as the loss of you, my children. Some may say leaving as he did was unforgivable.
At the time I agreed, but I’ve come to realise he was just trying his best to be happy — as he had every right to do.
The stress of infertility just widened existing cracks in our marriage, it wasn’t completely to blame. He went on to have three children with his girlfriend, now his wife. I learned about the first baby in a Christmas card from my ex-sister-in-law.
Of course it hurt, but I saw it as a trigger to finally let go of him and move on.
I do at least have the comfort of never having to explain to you that Daddy has moved out for some space.
And, in some ways, I was one of the lucky ones. My treatment was initially carried out on the NHS, then covered by your father’s very generous company health insurance. Had we had to pay it ourselves, it could have cost us as much as £15,000.
So at least I wasn’t left financially crippled, as well as having no husband and no baby.
My dreams of a family weren’t completely quashed.
Nineteen months after your father left me, I met Des — a haulage contractor — on a visit to Cornwall, and despite having little in common aside from both being dumped by our spouses, there was a spark between us. Slowly, we began to fall in love.
Almost 20 years later we are still together and have been married for 17. My life couldn’t be more different. I have a tanned, rugged countryman. I am loved and valued. I am happy.
Rather than a tasteful terrace in a chic part of the capital, home is an old and very beautiful farmhouse in an area of outstanding natural beauty in Cornwall, where I cook cakes in my Aga and tend my vegetable garden.
I’m all too aware it would have been the perfect life to bring children into.
And it certainly wasn’t that I stopped trying for you, but while we never took steps to prevent a pregnancy, I couldn’t face returning to the circle of hope and disappointment of fertility treatment. I was 37 when we agreed to leave it to fate. I did consider adoption, but by the time I had given up on having biological children, Des and I were settled into life as a two.
The realisation that I would never meet you, never feel your skin against mine, never know your love, crept up on me slowly as the years passed.
Now I’m at the menopause stage, it has got easier. I no longer have to endure those pangs when I hear of a friend’s pregnancy. But soon I will face my friends’ children getting married. When my friends become grandparents I will be reminded of another role I cannot play.
And when women complain about juggling a family and a successful career I often think my childlessness has made me a bad feminist. If my career had lost its glint as a result of your arrival then I hope that the sheer wonder of your existence might have enriched my life to make up for that loss.
I regret the little family traditions I can’t pass onto you; my mum’s failsafe lump-free gravy recipe, or her trick for stopping insect bites from itching. At Christmas, what new traditions would we have made?
In the future, I hope childlessness will become less of an unmentionable. More women are deferring having families until later, so a childless life will surely become more common. Already, one in five women born in 1969 is not going to be a mother, compared to one in nine women born in 1942. And while I’ll never regret the years of trying for you, I’ve learned there are some advantages — a tidy house and more money, for starters. I have learned to craft a life that I love. Ultimately, what I’d like all of you to know is that while the life you get may not be the life you dream of, it can still be a happy one filled with love. So my angels, I think I’m done. This will be my last letter to you.
Know that I love you, and that I always will, so very much.
All my love,