While trawling through the internet trying to find someone, anyone who had experienced something similar to what I was going through during my pregnancy I came across lots of women who, for whatever reason were unable to have children.
Clearly this is devastating for them and their partners and if they didn't want to or were unable to go down the route of adoption or surrogacy then their lives and families were never going to be complete.
Working on NICU, I care for lots of babies who've been born by one method of assisted conception or another. These methods, when successful often result in multiple pregnancies which, due to there being two or more foetuses are more likely to experience complications or end in premature births.
I've seen and heard about the lengths that some couples will go to in order to have a child when nature seems disinclined to help them.
Years of trying to conceive.
Pregnancy after pregnancy ending in miscarriage or a baby born before the age of viability.
Multiple attempts at IVF costing thousands of pounds.
Fertility drugs, hormone supplements.
Egg harvesting, embryo freezing.
On a personal level I do feel that if IVF is not successful after the couple of cycles then maybe this particular couple is just not supposed to have children.
Genetic incompatibility
The presence of a foetal condition that is incompatible with life but hasn't yet been identified or that we can screen for.
My heart breaks for these women (and their partners) but in some cases the feelings seem to only run in one direction.
Time after time I came across women who seemed to feel that I had no right to be depressed because I had managed to become pregnant, accidentally or otherwise when they couldn't.
In some cases they must have actively sought out blogs, message boards and support groups aimed at women who weren't happy to find themselves pregnant in order to tell us how selfish and ungrateful we were to feel this way.
As though their lack of child meant that we were obliged to be happy about finding ourselves in possession of one.
As though we could help our feelings.
I remember the Northern One spending hours searching the internet for something that might help me and eventually coming across a message board populated by women who, in real life were surrounded by people who were thrilled and excited about their pregnancy but they themselves were unable to conjure up the same emotions.
He started to read the entries out to me in attempt to make me feel like less of a monster and so utterly alone but among the posts by women whose thoughts I could maybe relate to, one post stood out, for all the wrong reasons.
"I can't have children and that's what makes me sad."
I think I may have shut down at that point.
I was already finding it impossible to rationalise my feelings towards being pregnant with the image of the happy, glowing mum-to-be that the media was relentlessly projecting at me without yet more people telling me that the only correct reaction to being pregnant was absolute joy.
It wasn't my fault that they didn't have the children that they longed for but somehow it meant that I must long for my own baby even though I couldn't.
I gave up looking in the end.
The more I searched for people who felt as I did the more I became convinced that I was alone.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to try and reach out to others who were going through to had been through similar things and felt that they didn't have anyone to talk to about their feelings. I wanted the blog to be a safe haven where people could make their true feelings known without worrying that there would be negative responses or repercussions.
I have had some negative comments about posts that I've written but I've not published the comments and have no intention of doing so. Everyone has the right to their own opinion but people who search out my blog for the purpose of disagreeing with me and to tell me that I'm a bad person; their opinion has no place here.
No woman has to be happy about their pregnancy or excited about having a baby.
Just because their are couples who are unfortunate enough to not be able to conceive it doesn't mean that others must be grateful.
I hope my blog is found by those that need it, that they feel safe in speaking out and that it helps them to realise that they are entitled to feel whatever feelings they experience. That they don't need to be ashamed or guilty and that the misfortune of others is not their fault.
I hope I can give them what I so badly needed but couldn't find.