GOING TO THE edge

It’s been a bumpy and unconventional journey, this pregnancy business. In my mid-thirties, various specialists told me I’d never be able to have kids. I was going through premature menopause, they said, a side effect of my Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid. But then I managed to reverse all the antibody markers over 10 years of work on my health and got pregnant in an eleventh-hour anomaly at 42 with a man I’d loved. Then I miscarried. Then we split.

I ached to have a child. Through two decades of friends having their first then second kids and sharing their joy and fatigue. Through relationships with men who liked the idea of a woman who wasn’t gunning for kids, then one day, a few months in, not liking the idea of a “barren woman”.

This ache is particular. It’s love that longs to give unconditionally but is denied its object of outpouring, so it expands and expands and sings out into the vast vacuum of the night. And you can do all the self-love work and crystal healing or whatever you like, but that aching love