The Long Path to Motherhood: How Nature, Walking and Poetry Can Ease the Grief of Infertility

By Elizabeth Black

In a painful year of personal and national sadness, can walking bring about healing? The Long Path to Motherhood is a nature memoir that explores how engaging with nature through walking can help us recover from difficult times in our lives.

The book centres on the author’s need to confront her grief at failing to have children and her quest to shape a new life beyond the one she imagined. Walking the Great Stones Way from Avebury to Stonehenge and encountering ancient stones, eerie burial chambers and sacred places, the book asks how placing ourselves in nature can help us to move from loss to acceptance and reveal new ways of living that are rich and valuable. Throughout the walk, these questions are shadowed by the poetry of Edward Thomas: a poet whose struggles with mental health were eased by nature and walking.

Through the experience of being in these special landscapes, the book aims to show how engaging with the beauty, mystery and otherness of nature can generate healing. It is ultimately a hopeful book that acknowledges that whilst there are dark points in everyone’s lives, nature has the potential to guide us towards light, recovery and happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805146032

Book preview

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Copyright © 2023 Elizabeth Black

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781805146032

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Written for Charlie and dedicated to the memory of my beloved mother, Mary Harris:

‘Where shall we go?’

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Avebury, Silbury Hill, West Kennett Long Barrow and The Sanctuary

Chapter 2: Alton Barnes White Horse to Upavon

Chapter 3: Upavon to Woodhenge

Chapter 4: Woodhenge to Stonehenge

Conclusion

Preface

It is 7.30am. I am sat on the edge of the bath watching planes as they make their final descent into Heathrow. I look from the window to the mirror. The morning light is stark and unforgiving. My pale, blotchy skin and pink, swollen eyes remind me of the women I see on Instagram, who post mascara-streaked selfies of their lowest moments accompanied with lists of hash-tagged acronyms that connect the members of this terrible club. I turn away from the mirror and feel my anger rising. For no logical reason, I think that things should be different for me. That I’m a special in some way and shouldn’t be part of this tragic community. I look back at my reflection and know that this isn’t true. The test in my hand confirms it with a single, stubborn line. There is no pregnancy. There will be no baby. Acting like a spoilt child and crying that it’s unfair won’t change anything. I wrap the test in toilet paper and throw it in the bin. I listen for sounds of movement in the hallway and wait until I am certain that there is no one else around. I don’t want to see or speak to anyone. My only desire is to escape the confines of the flat and outwalk my sadness. I want to take my sorrow and drown it in the Thames, trample it into the muddy river path or lose it in the dense thickets of the woods. I pick up my shoes and flee the inside space of disappointment and panic to disappear into the vast aliveness of the world.

Introduction

‘… going out, I found, was really going in’.

Robert Frost

I have always turned to walking when life has become hard. Something in the physical act of getting up and leaving the house, even for ten minutes, has always given me an intoxicating sense of freedom. Walking rebels against sadness by breaking its spell of stillness. It provides at least a façade of intention and action by physically moving you outside your claustrophobic thoughts and into the vibrant world beyond. Over the years, walking has become my main strategy for coping with low times. With each step, I can feel the knots of stress or anger loosening and my tangled thoughts unravelling until I am able to see each strand of the problem more clearly and move towards resolution. Making myself leave the house can often be the hardest part, but once outside I can begin to open myself up to the rest of the world and notice how wonderfully unphased it is by my personal dramas. The absolute neutrality of nature can sometimes seem cold, but it can also make your troubles diminish against the immense otherness of the living world. I don’t only walk when I feel sad. I also walk when buoyed by happiness or when exciting opportunities make me fizz with energy until I have to get out to meet the day. In these moods I can be overwhelmed by the beauty of everything, grateful that I am healthy enough to go outside and even thankful for the episodes of gloom that heighten my appreciation of their opposite. Whatever the reason for doing so, I walk almost every day, noticing the changing seasons, weather and colours, and knowing that I will return home feeling better than when I left.

Last year, however, I was less certain that my old cure would work. A new type of sadness had crept up on me. One that felt deeper than before and harder to shift. In the past, my occasional periods of feeling low had always been related to a specific situation that I knew I could fix given time. Temporary frustrations at work or in relationships that would upset me for a while, but which I knew wouldn’t last forever. This new type of sadness was different. It didn’t pass over time but instead settled into an ever-present ache, as if a chill had got in the bones. The source of the pain was clear, but the solution was not. At first my life had followed a conventional pattern: I met a man, fell in love and we got married. I had assumed, without giving it too much thought, that a baby would follow at some point and we would become a happy little family. Time passed. There were distractions: I changed jobs, published a book and moved from Manchester to London. I was busy, but not too busy to notice how long it had been since I had stopped taking my contraceptive pill, or to become increasingly aware of the number of friends and family members filling their social media with photos of babies. Gradually my doubts about getting pregnant shifted from an occasional dark flicker across my thoughts to a constant low-lying cloud that darkened every aspect of my life. After four years it was clear that this wasn’t going to happen easily for us. I had envisioned a certain type of life centred on birthday parties, magical Christmases, milestone photos of first days at school and the liveliness of a family home. I had been so ignorant about fertility that it hadn’t even crossed my mind that this may not be possible, especially as it seemed to happen so easily for everyone else. Surrounded by constant images of happy families, I struggled to envision a future with no child of my own. I tried to feel grateful for what I had, but I was devastated by the prospect of living a life where I would flinch each time a stranger asked me if I had children. A life spent forcing myself to write joyful responses to endless pregnancy announcements. To endure what often seemed like an overwhelming barrage of films, articles and social media posts celebrating the magic of family life and the unmatchable love between a mother and a child. I knew that having children wasn’t all roses, but even the absence of the difficult times felt like a loss.

The lowest point of my personal sadness collided with a period of huge global trauma caused by the pandemic. We had started 2020 on Hampstead Heath, drinking beer and watching fireworks explode across London’s skyline. On New Year’s Day we made plans for trips and projects unaware of what was ahead of us. First the news started reporting on an outbreak of a mysterious virus in China. A few weeks later we heard that it had spread to Italy. In retrospect it was inevitable that we would be next; the steady stream of planes descending over our flat into Heathrow were a constant reminder of how interconnected the world was. However, it was still surprising when we saw someone wearing a face mask in Richmond for the first time. Surely that was an overaction to an illness that was no worse than the flu? The announcement of a national lockdown in March and the rapidly filling hospital wards swiftly removed any doubts about its seriousness. My work told us not to come onto campus anymore and we all rushed to adapt to teaching and meeting online. I went to the local supermarket and found the shelves emptied of bread, milk and pasta. I came back and created strange meals with mismatched ingredients from the back of the cupboard, which we ate in front of televised prime ministerial announcements of new restrictions accompanied by brutal graphs of spikes and deaths. On the high street people passed each other in wide circles or flared up if they weren’t given enough space. The mundane activities of work, shopping socialising and travel altered immediately or stopped completely as the world struggled to comprehend a virus that sometimes showed no symptoms and whose test was difficult to obtain.

After a few months, the initial shock of our new restricted lifestyles softened into a broader sadness and longing. People missed friends and family but kept away to protect them. The papers filled with images of exhausted NHS workers with faces imprinted by tight PPE, grandparents holding their palms out to grandchildren against windowpanes, and before and after family photos with missing figures. The grief of those who had lost loved ones could not even be eased by rituals or company. Funeral numbers were limited and visits to the sick and elderly made virtually impossible. There was a clear divide in how the pandemic affected people depending on whether they were classed as front-line workers. For those who were, this period was one of exhaustion and high personal risk. For others like me who could work from home, the new rules brought some more welcome changes. It was a relief to swap my hour-long commute on the sluggish 33 bus for a morning walk by the Thames and to work at my own desk rather than in the stuffy university office. I could get up later, go for a walk and still open my laptop on time each day. We didn’t have a garden, but I was grateful that we had recently moved from the centre of Manchester to somewhere that had so much green space surrounding it despite being on the edge of London. Even the extortionate rent for our tiny flat seemed worth it for the gardens, parks and river at the end of the road. All this was accompanied by the constant guilt of enjoying anything when so many were suffering and exhausted, but the release from the office to an alternative way of working felt revolutionary.

Despite the improvements to our working patterns, as the restrictions dragged on the walls seemed to close in on us. After six months, we even began to tire of the beautiful river walk to Richmond, which passed picture perfect stately homes and gently bobbing boats. On the weekends we went further to Richmond Park, steering wide circles around the rutting deer and dodging the speeding bikes. I continued to be grateful for the green spaces, my health and my job, but without distractions to block it out, I could feel the old sadness seeping in and mixing with a broader longing for people and plans. Something about the emptiness of the present connected to my fear of how it would be if we never had children. I began to notice more articles on the repercussions of fertility clinics pausing procedures and the painful consequences of this for those on their very last chances to conceive. With so much of the world shut down, my life began to be overshadowed by the prospect of never having children. I saw my fortieth birthday on the horizon and panicked. I educated myself about ovulation and was astounded to find out that it was only possible to get pregnant a few days each month. How on earth had I never been told this? I kicked into action. Time was no longer divided into months, but ovulation cycles marked by daisies and hearts on pink fertility apps. As the months passed, I began to hate the cutesy graphics that hid a predictably cruel pattern: try, wait, hope, grieve. I tried to grasp onto anecdotes of women becoming mothers in their forties and miracle babies appearing after years of trying, but the statistics were bleak and it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by the slim chances of us conceiving naturally.

My struggle to conceive changed me. I had always been a sociable, friendly person, but I became so hypersensitive to any mention of babies or fertility that I began to isolate myself. Trying to conceive gives you a heightened awareness of just how obsessed our culture is with motherhood. Scrolling through endless celebrity pregnancy announcements and gender reveal posts on social media became a type of self-harm that stoked my hurt and bitterness. I’d turn on the television for escape and find whole series about reality stars having babies, as if they were the first women to ever experience it. It all seemed an overwhelming celebration of a club to which I was denied entry. I retreated from friends who were pregnant or had children. I knew that it was unforgivably unfair to exclude people from my life on the basis that they could reproduce, but I couldn’t stop myself. I despised the small-minded, petty person I had become. My sadness was poisonous and it was also dangerous. Beyond ruining friendships, it

Reviews for The Long Path to Motherhood

[Vicki H · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An honest depiction of the complex path one takes when trying to get pregnant.