The beginning of February marked the third anniversary of our quota of children increasing from zero to three. The anniversary of our life being tipped upside down, shaken violently all over the floor, stamped on a few times, and then scraped back into it’s container to admire as one might a bug accidentally trodden on.
Anybody new to my blog will be scratching their head at this point - wondering what on earth I am talking about.
Perhaps it’s time to look back - time to begin recounting the story of how we ended up with three amazing little girls…
About seven years ago we decided to try for a family - we had been married for long enough to have had some fun - had done the “couple holiday” thing several times, had travelled the world a little, and had bought a huge house with an improbably large garden. We were starting to settle.
The fun of “trying” for children slowly stretched to weeks, and then months. During this time we started switching off television programmes involving babies, and avoiding people with young children. It sounds horrific now, but we really did it. We surrounded ourselves with other childless couples, and effectively buried our heads in the sand.
Continued failure to turn a test strip blue finally culminated in us “seeing somebody”. After several months waiting to see various consultants we were about to be prescribed all manner of fertility drugs when a chance meeting occurred. After a frenzy of emails, the promise of jumping the queue, and having all costs paid for us by the television company, we became famous for fifteen minutes on breakfast television in the UK.
We were collected in the early hours of the morning and driven to the television studios. We took turns to have our makeup done while sitting across the room from television soap opera stars plugging the latest storyline. We sat in the green room and smiled at the faces of breakfast television as they snuck in to steal all the best biscuits and complain about the machine coffee.
I remember being dazzled by one of the female presenters who was much smaller, much more shy, and much prettier in real life than she was on television.
Our story? Our story was me.
A genetic defect had been discovered under an electron microscope that prevented us having children. The lack of a single enzyme. In the same way that some people are tall, some are short, some have green eyes, or some blue, I too was different - not in any way you could see, or any way that would ever have been found without the lab showing off their kit for the television cameras.
Following our moment of fame, we returned to reality. Eighteen months later, already in enormous debt, our final attempt at IVF failed - we lost the baby at about 17 weeks. W was hospitalised, and I didn’t tell her for months after how scared I had been when all the alarms went off in her hospital room. Doctors ran from all directions and fought for several agonising moments while I sat and trusted in their skill, experience, knowledge and training.
I can still remember the night we sat eating dinner a couple of months later and began talking about adoption for the first time. I remember the tears.
We had no idea what was to come, how long it would take, how hard it would be, how many hoops we would have to jump through, how deep we would need to dig, or how much strength we would find in ourselves along the way.
Another story for another day perhaps.