‘At 45, I grieved the idea of motherhood. Then, by pure fluke, I was pregnant’

all. I am highly likely to survive childbirth, but I will be changed by it, too.

There is a kind of clock of fertility that many women are aware of, and mine is a kind of Schrödinger’s clock. It is possible, for example, that my clock has already run out, and it is too late for me to use my body to make a child. Or it is possible my clock is still ticking along. The fact of my not knowing used to be a thing that plunged me into

Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?

She was luminous with a bliss that wiped out the exhaustion and physical demands of a difficult birth and a baby who struggled to feed.

am separated from another woman, my friend, because I cannot talk about this part of motherhood: the wanting and then the getting and the resenting and the missing, the longing.