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.