Despatches from a mother who started late (and is running to catch up)

A funny old year

Some highlights - and some not-so-good bits - from 2007:

January - back to work for first time since having Beanie. It's like returning from exile in a foreign country. Painful to be parted from her. In more ways than one. Am still breastfeeding so by mid-morning my boobs are so hard I have to squirt out milk by hand in the loo to relieve the pain. My co-workers all seem young, slim and trendy. They're a nice crowd, but I bet none of them have ever even seen the structural monstrosity that is a nursing bra. It's hard to be hip when you're lactating. Am struggling to lose post-pregnancy weight.

February - builders rip our flat apart to investigate for dry rot.  Fitted carpets (laid only a year earlier) are taken up, architraves ripped off the window recesses.There isn't any rot, as it turns out, but in darker moments I sometimes think there might as well have been, with all the mess, upheaval and expense.

March - pregnant again, after only the first month of trying. It happens so easily, the pregnancy feels unreal from the outset. Va-vay and I - both exhausted from last year's onslaught - are ambivalent. An air of unbelievability hangs over the pregnancy's entire (short) duration. I'm not sick, tired or dizzy. At the time, this seems a good thing.

Start this blog, following a chance encounter with a writer at an Edinburgh City of Literature evening. Unsure where it will take me.

April -  Beanie's first birthday and our second wedding anniversary. Beanie walking.  Reluctantly, I wind down breastfeeding, thinking I should concentrate resources on the new baby.

May - start bleeding, losing bright red blood. When we go for a scan the next day, the monitor shows the baby has no heartbeat and probably died several weeks previously. People quote statistics at me, telling me 'how common' it is. Despite my earlier ambivalence about the pregnancy, am wretched at losing it. Feel a fool as well.

June - Va-vay goes on reproductive strike. He wants a break over the summer from trying for a child. I am now desperate for another baby. Everywhere I look I see prams, babies and smiling mothers. Despite the statistics, I can't imagine any of them ever having a miscarriage. I interrogate friends on whether they're pregnant, dreading them saying yes. It isn't healthy, but I can't help it.

July - Counselling helps me start to come to terms with the loss - and I manage to agree to wait before trying again.

August - Edinburgh International Book Festival. Hear Ian McEwan, Benedict Allen, Colin Thubron, Janice Galloway, Kate Mosse, Simon Armitage, Antonia Swinson, Esther Freud and Kitty Aldridge speak. This is fun. Realise I haven't enjoyed going out and about like this since before I was pregnant with Beanie.

September -  Scott Pack of The Friday Project signs me up to write a handbook for women who become mums 'fashionably late'. Looks like this blogging business is going somewhere after all.

October - holiday in France. Happy days.



November - turn forty. The event I've been dreading all year. Worse in the anticipation than the deed. A slap-up lunch with Va-vay eases the pain. I felt like this when I turned thirty - now I can't understand what the fuss was about.

December - difficult start to the month, with what would have been my due date. But good news follows. Can't say too much at the moment, but will keep you posted in 2008.

Posted 31 December 2007 11:25

Books Fashionably Late - the book Miscarriage Work

• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Reddit
• Facebook
• Digg