Meet my children. My eldest, Herbie and Pete (or rather their ashes), are inside a little wooden casket, which is inside the velvet bag on the left there with its sweet embroidery, asking me to forget-them-not. The plastic tube contains embryos number seven and eight, which I asked to have returned to me from the fertility clinic after it became clear that I couldn’t do any more treatment. Embryo number one didn’t survive the thawing process. Embryo number two didn’t implant. Three and four became Herbie and Pete. Five didn’t implant. Six miscarried at about seven weeks. Then there was the one and only, somewhat surprising non-treatment assisted pregnancy that also miscarried at about seven or eight weeks.
It’s Mothers Day here. Again. There’s no stopping it, I’m afraid. It’s a barrage of marketing and an onslaught of commercialism. It’s a fucked up way of acknowledging that mothers do way more than their fair share and need one morning a year to lie in and get brought a boiled egg with toasted soldiers. Instead of providing affordable childcare and creating systems and a culture where all parents do their bit within robust networks of support. It’s a way of exalting motherhood without actually respecting or valuing women. And still, even though I reject the premise, it’s a day that has hurt my feelings so deeply for so many years by being such an unavoidable reminder that, despite doing everything I was supposed to - over and over and over again - I did not have the children that I longed for. I was Tiny Tim looking at a glistening turkey through the butcher shop window at Christmas. Except with far less grace.
And then, as I was visited by loss after loss, the day and all its fandango became a magnifying glass over my wounds. Not only would I never be brought a boiled egg and toasted soldiers by my children who had died but I had to learn to live without the hope that I would ever have a living child to share my life with. One that I could watch grow into whoever they were going to be, without having to simply imagine it. Where our relationship would be between them and me, as well as me and them. That’s the thing about being a mother to children who have died. You don’t stop being their mum and they don’t stop being your bairns but it becomes very one-sided. I was enraged that this was the only experience of being a parent that I would ever get. I wanted so much more.
And now? I don't know. I think the hunger I felt in my body to grow a baby might have finally subsided. The feeling of being ripped out of an experience that I had waited so long for and was finding so much joy in - I’m not sure that that will ever leave me. But I don’t think I feel so badly that I need to complete it anymore. This is still a stupid, terrible day, in my opinion, and it brings up sadness from my bones. But the fury seems to have subsided to some degree. So, that’s a little less exhausting.
A sob rises in my chest and quickly passes through my blocked sinuses before making its way out through my breath and my tear ducts. Hi there, boys. What are you up to today? Looks like a good day for going out on your bikes or having a clamber through the woods. Come out with me and the dogs, if you like. I think we’ll go to the airfield to see the orange windsock. Join us through the busy bird song and the rustling of the leaves. The snap of a twig underfoot. The gust of wind that catches my breath. The flash of a roe deer’s fluffy white tail as it disappears into the trees. A lazy drift of cloud that has snagged on the pine tops further up the hill. Come, however and whenever you are able. I’ll be there.