I Will Never be a Parent.

It’s the end of a chapter. The end of an incredibly heartbreaking, traumatic and tumultuous time in my life. I’ve honestly seen so much disruption, anguish and what has felt like catastrophe in these last 16 months that I wonder how I’ve been left standing at all. After another miscarriage, my third, and this time with twins, I’ve nowhere left to go anymore but to give up the challenge. This is the end of a journey towards parenthood that my husband and I once hoped for ourselves and the stark reality is as jarring as it is sobering. We will never be parents. We will never get to see ourselves in another being. We’ll never get to hear the laughter of our child, never get to look into their eyes and see their future. What we’re left with is silence and an overwhelming feeling of isolation in a journey that should have amounted to our rainbow baby.

It’s difficult to even sit down and write this; but I understand why I need to. I feel compelled to tell my story because it’s one that doesn’t have a happy ending; or at least not in the way that you would expect. I will never share my stories of pregnancy loss and then end them with the tale of that rainbow baby that made it all worth it. After so much loss, my arms will forever be empty and that’s just how this story goes. I read something the other day which spoke to our collective discomfort with infertility, because we can’t quite get our heads around a problem that can’t be solved. We’re fed this narrative that if we try hard enough, never give up, keep our positive thoughts up, then anything can happen. We are unstoppable if we allow ourselves to be and manifesting anything is possible. The thing with that is sometimes that just isn’t true. Sometimes this world is cruel; it taunts us with hope, only to take it away at the last minute and kick us when we’re down. Sometimes there is no lesson to be learnt, only to be endured. 

I spent 5 months after my second miscarriage last year in a deep hole of what had to be depression. Nothing felt right; nothing brought me joy. I felt numb in between periods of sobbing for days on end. But with time came peace. I felt inklings of myself arising again after many months of slumber. Before I found out I was pregnant for the third time, I’d made peace with where I was. I finally felt like myself again and saw joy and light everywhere I looked. All of a sudden I was me again and I knew that my life would be worth more than being defined by one thing. I was incredibly hopeful for my future. But after this last loss, here I find myself again; stuck at the bottom of that well desperately searching for the light. 

I understand that right now my hormones are off. When you have a miscarriage your HCG levels and estrogen and progesterone rapidly drop and fall off what feels like a cliff. It leaves you feeling such sadness that you can’t escape from. It feels like a debilitating cloud hovers over you constantly and you can’t see the sky past it. Before this I felt completely ambivalent, trying to distance what has happened to me. But I can see that this has impeded and impacted my ability to emotionally process the loss of what could have been. The cruellest part of all of this are those glimpses of what parenthood would be. Which teased me into dreaming of that family, of those children that were almost mine.

For now, I stand here understanding this is the end of my journey down a potential path of life that I’m sure would have been incredibly rewarding. For a while there I really believed. Maybe the losses made me want it so much more. Being pregnant 3 times in 16 months has subjected me to a hormonal torrential onslaught where I can’t quite pin down what my actual feelings are. But in the back of my mind, I can’t help but think that it was never meant for me in the first place. A few days before I found out I was pregnant this last time I wrote a poem which started.. “for I will never be a parent”. It almost felt like I foresaw this exact moment and was preparing myself for the journey to be embarked on afterwards.

Right now I am a ball of mixed emotions. Sometimes I’m fine, other times I find myself sobbing for no reason and I can’t stop. What I know is that I will give myself the time to grieve. I will sit in my sadness of a life path now lost. But I am also hopeful for my future. For my body is more than a vessel. I am more than an almost mother. I am a wife, a daughter, a friend, a colleague and an activist. I care about people deeply; I believe in fighting against injustice; in fighting for a better world. I see the beauty in the most mundane things at times and that’s just who I am. I believe in my future and the impact I can make in this world; in spite of my childlessness. So for now, it is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to the parent I could have been. As I now embark on the journey of the person I will become.