s a writer, words are my trade, but I find it difficult to describe the sense of devastation that swept over me the day I finally relinquished hope of ever becoming a mother. I had clung onto that hope for almost two decades, maintaining it through a decision not to bring children into an abusive relationship, an extended period of being single, followed by infertility and early menopause, and then withdrawing – at a very early stage – from an adoption process because of poor mental health. Even after all that, I still had hope, but one day when I was in my early 40s, I discovered that the hope – which had been both a lifeboat keeping me afloat and a prison preventing me from conceiving of the possibility of a
