Three years ago, I had entirely given up hope of ever having another child.
On my 40th birthday, after trying for over 5 years to get and/or stay pregnant beyond 5 weeks, and many early miscarriages, a missed miscarriage at 13 weeks, discovered at the dating scan after a very tumultuous 3 months with many scares, I decided to give away all the baby things I'd been saving for the baby I felt was still out there waiting to come.
Various friends were having babies. Some had themselves suffered the demon of infertility, so I was pleased for them. I wanted my babies' things to go to living babies, rather than lie unworn and unused in our attic.
Having decided to stop trying, we didn't bother with contraception- after all we'd been shagging for five years with only one confirmed and then failed pregnancy, so why bother with it?
And then, a month after I'd given away most of the clothes to 4 different friends, I suspected I might be pregnant again. Expecting this one to fail, I did not give it a second thought. We went away to Budapest as planned at the end of November 2008 to celebrate a friend's birthday. I had my sanitary towels with me as expecting my period to start any moment.
We ate, drank and made merry for four days, went in the lovely hot pools, hot saunas, etc. I was seriously in nihilistic mode. Determined that I would do nothing to acknowledge the fact that my period was now 1, 2, 3 days overdue. After all, this one would fail too, right?
Some time on a Friday morning in mid-December 2008, after DH had left the house with the older children for the day, I did a test that had been sitting in the bathroom cupboard for a few years.
Pregnant.
I refused to believe it, and buried the test in the bottom of the bin bag that was about to go out for the bin men.
Shaking like a leaf, I went outside and shifted half a ton of fire wood into the garage.
After the weekend, I bought another, supposedly more reliable test and repeated it in the daytime.
Pregnant. Still.
By this stage I felt like a teenager accidentally up the duff. Of course I/we wanted this child, but we had given up and I was 40, nearly 41 for Pete's sake! The enormity of what we'd done was suddenly crushing. I was scared of losing the baby and scared of not losing it. The emotional load was undescribably huge.
I still hadn't told my DH because I didn't want him to worry. He does not handle stress very well and I didn't want him to be worrying about me miscarrying as well. Failure to conceive isolates you, even from those closest to you.
Shortly afterwards I started a thread on MN asking whether I was being unreasonable not to have told him yet. The consensus was that I was.
I finally told him on late Christmas Eve- he came to bed late, having been wrapping some last minute presents.
Early in January, still entirely disbelieving that I could possibly be carrying a viable baby, I went to the GP, where all the talk was of potential problems due to my extreme old age, testing, previous miscarriage history, yadda yadda. I was around 8 weeks by that stage.
We decided to have all testing done before announcing anything to anyone. It all felt so unreal, yet here I was feeling sick and tired. Bearing in mind that we'd lost the last one at 13 weeks, I refused to believe that this might actually happen, and continued to feel sure that something would go wrong.
But the pregnancy continued, overshadowed by this damnable conviction that something, somewhere had to go wrong, and the unshakable feeling that I would not end up with a live baby at the end of this, that the fates would contrive to make something go wrong.
I worked and worked as much as was offered me. The pregnancy continued, I felt extremely well, all tests came back with flying colours. No problems from my advanced obstetric age. Hospital staff mentioned my "precious baby" a few times, and all I could think was "it's not here yet", and truly feel that it never would.
And so into August 2009, and with apprehension and bovine late pregnancy calm still vying for space in my head, I went overdue- not unusual for me, all the others were 10-13 days over.
When my waters went at over 10 days overdue by my dates, I was relieved. After 4 days and a very large number of procedures including failed induction, a crash c section and a 6 day spell in nicu, DD3 entered our lives, unravelled by hand from the cord which she'd managed to wrap around her legs so many times she couldn't have made it out alive under her own steam. Over 6 years late, but here and perfect.
Beautiful as she is, I spent the first year of her life convinced that I didn't deserve her and that she could still be taken from me.
She's a lucky baby- it's not such a bad billet for her, with fun siblings and loads of animals, but I feel like the luckiest person alive. I look at her and thank her every day for choosing to come and live with us.