Whenever I see a birth announcement, a baby photo posted on social media, a mother pushing her newborn in a pram, I’m overcome with longing.
In fact, my husband Tim, 55, and I have been blessed with four healthy children - Henry, 11, Caleb, seven, and four-year-old twin girls Maisy and Essie. Yet still I yearn for a fifth baby. So when I read how both Jools Oliver, wife of chef Jamie, and Tana Ramsay, wife of Gordon, were each pregnant with their fifth child — and both are a year older than me — I felt a surge of hope, and more than a smidgen of jealousy.
Looking back to my early childhood, I cannot remember a time when I didn’t look forward to being a mum. I dressed my dolls in cast-off baby clothes donated by my aunties and my mum — I’m one of four children — and pushed them in a real child’s buggy. I first met Tim when I was 12 — he was friends with my best friend’s mum and dad — but as Tim was 27, there was no hint of romance between us. I did find him terribly handsome, though, and thought of him many times during my teenage years.
A further six months on we were married, and by then I was already pregnant with Henry. When my eight-week scan showed the distinct outline of a tiny form growing inside me, I almost burst with happiness. But in two years I started to get broody again. Now 34, it was as if a switch had been flicked in my mind: the minute Caleb became a toddler and started to be less dependent on me, the yearning for another baby kicked in.
When the scan revealed they were girls, both Tim and I felt blessed that we would have the perfect family. U nlike so many mothers, I felt blessed to be raising my children full-time — I’d been happy to relinquish my job as an office administrator to become a mum — and I didn’t need lectures on how many offspring I was entitled to.
It was four days before hospital doctors diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy — the foetus was growing in one of my fallopian tubes — and I had to be given a drug to terminate the pregnancy safely. Of course, I knew I was lucky to have my children, but shouldn’t I be allowed to feel sorrow for the one I’d lost? And my grief was also accompanied by longing: I began to yearn for another baby with such awful intensity it consumed all my waking thoughts.
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