Moving on up

The next six months were dreadful. I was so very, very angry about my lot in life. It just seemed so incredibly unfair that because I hadn't been lucky enough to meet someone who cared for me and who wanted to have children, I was going to be single and childless. It felt like if you were in a relationship you held all the cards, if you were single you had none. It felt enormously cruel.

I had considered having a child using donor sperm vaguely in the past when yet another relationship had broken down and my late 30s were approaching but there was always a part of me that hoped that the next relationship would be 'the one' and I would have a child as part of a conventional loving relationship. As the due date of the 'miracle baby' approached, I knew I had to do something special, be somewhere different. I decided to go to Peru and walk the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu. By a strange twist of fate, on my due date, I walked up to the summit of the trail - the dead woman's pass. I wasn't physically dead but some of me had died inside. At the top of the trail - XXX m, I put some coca leaves on a stone and made a wish - a Quechua way of asking the gods for what you want. I asked for my child. And as I walked down the other side of the pass, I knew what I needed to do. Stop fannying about and waiting for this perfect man to appear and become a mother on my own. I knew I could cope financially, I knew I had the support of my family and friends. If I could conceive and carry a baby to term I could do this.

World turned upside down

I spent the next few weeks feverishly working out budgets - how much could I save, how much does a baby cost and where the money was going to come from. It's so much easier to focus on the financial side of things than the emotional - I knew I was going to have to tell people at some point but I didn't know how. Perhaps if I had really good sums they would be more supportive? I tested this theory on my friends and they were very positive albeit shocked at a piece of news you're not really expecting from a single friend. My big issue was telling my family though. How the hell I was going to explain to them that I, a professional woman of 39, had had a one night stand with a man I'd never met before and was pregnant and keeping the baby? Even thinking about it made me feel sick. And I wasn't feeling that pucker to start with.

Dramatic news doesn't get any better the longer you leave it though and so eventually, at about 9 weeks, I bit the bullet and told my elderly parents, fully expecting to be shown the door - at least until the baby was born. The rebel in me was slightly disappointed by how delighted they were. My mum even came with me to the 12 week scan, they were that keen to be involved.

Unfortunately that's when it all went tits up. Clutching my bounty bag and lying back waiting to see the amazing first images of my miracle baby.the scanographer lifted the scanner off my tummy and said 'I'm so very sorry but your baby has died'. It was like someone had slammed a rock into my heart. How could that be? This baby was a bloody miracle, conceived against all the odds. It was meant to be, not to die before the first scan!

But a follow up scan a week later confirmed it - I'd had a missed miscarriage which is the cruellest prognosis for any new pregnancy. Although the foetus has died, your body doesn't realise and carries on thinking it's pregnant so you and your body are merrily carrying on doing the whole pregnancy thing, even though there isn't actually a baby there any more. To say I was devastated would be an understatement. I had made such an enormous emotional investment in this baby being a miracle that I had never even contemplated the idea that I might miscarry. In retrospect that seems absolutely absurd - at my age, the chance of miscarriage is really high - but I had ignored all that because as far as I was concerned this was such a special pregnancy that there was no way it could fail.

I have never been as sad as I was in those next few months. I grieved not only for that lost baby but also for my hopes of ever becoming a mother. I hadn't realised how much hope I had been holding out that it would happen until I miscarried and now my imaginary future was crashing down. My family were utterly amazing - my mother virtually moved in and gently guided her daughter through all the appointments and the horrible days of agonisingly painful bleeding where I didn't dare look down the toilet as huge pieces of tissue slithered out of me. I flushed and returned to my weeping on the sofa - I knew what I had lost and seeing it lying in the toilet bowl was not going to help. Eventually the miscarriage ended and I was back to where I was before. A forty year old woman, single and with no prospect of a relationship on the horizon, wanting to have children. But I was no longer simply wanting to be a mother, I was desperate. That pregnancy was like a key unlocking all the repressed desires to be pregnant, to give birth, to parent, to share my life with a child. Basically, all the things that my friends in relationships were experiencing but that were closed off to me because I didn't have a partner.

In the beginning, there was the one night stand ...

Just before my 40th birthday, I went drinking with my friends to the 'mad beer' pub. I won't tell you where it is but suffice to say that the particular brand of German lager they have on tap there has led to fights, pregnancies and unimagined couplings among my friends who are a middle class North London group of people who are not generally inclined to Jeremy Kyle-worthy behaviour. But there is something about that beer. I fell victim that evening - not to the fights but to the last two transgressions. I ended up sleeping with a friend of a friend who told me the next morning that he lived with his long term girlfriend. Typical I thought as I said goodbye but a few weeks' later, I knew I was pregnant. I don't know how, I just did. And when I did a pregnancy test, it was confirmed. How the bloody hell had I managed to get pregnant after one shag when I was 39 and 363 days?? It's supposed to take months to get pregnant at that age - not one random shag without contraception!

My feelings were all over the shop. On the one hand, I was delighted - I was fertile! On the other - the bloke was clearly a twat and not someone who looked like they were going to be brilliant dad material. On another hand (I'm channelling Ganesh here), I was thinking there is no way I can do this on my own. On another, why not?

But my overriding feeling was that this conception was a bloody miracle. I'd managed to get pregnant after one night with a man when I had no idea where I was in my cycle. Friends had tried for months and months to conceive with carefully planned sex and here I was, several years' older, duffed up without even trying. I felt like a fertility goddess and it seemed utterly wrong to seriously contemplate having a termination. I'd been wanting to be a mother for years but was never with the right man at the right time.

I floated through the the first few weeks in a daze, not telling anyone, trying to get some actual decisions together before I did because I knew there'd be a barrage of questions and I didn't have any answers. I was adamant I was going to keep the baby though because how could I not? It had been conceived against all the odds - it was the runt of the litter probability-wise and I was the only person who could nurture it further. I've always been a sucker for a hard luck story.