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.