Well it's officially a right royal congratulations for the third time to good old Wills and Kate! I've always felt a slight affinity with the pair. I'm not a royalist nor against the royal family, in fact I don't spend any time thinking about the Royals at all generally. So I guess the said affinity comes from the fact that Wills and Kate got married only a couple of months before my husband and I. The build-up to the royal wedding was also the lead up to ours and so whenever I see footage of their big day, it takes me back to the giddy final couple of months of prep for our own big day.
The day of their wedding, our then street had the obligatory street party with a real buzz. I'd just returned from a huge global work trip at the time and so once I had the trip over and done with, the street party was that one final milestone til I was about to say "I do" too.
Hop forward to Kate's first pregnancy being announced. I remember it well, albeit not quite as fondly. I was driving home from work. It had been a tough day. The newsreader said the words, "Kate Middleton is pregnant with her first child." It landed at a time when of course we had also been married for coming up to a year and were already getting the, "Baby?" question from every man, woman, cat and dog. Only we had no news to report.
I had come off my pill a little while before our wedding. We figured 'why not' at the time. We didn't necessarily expect anything to happen straight away as of course you hear all the tales of 'needing to get the Pill out of your system' etc, nor in our what now seem like naive minds at the time, did it matter if I had a 'Bump on Board' at the wedding - it would hardly have been a shotgun wedding after 12 years together!
We saw out the whole of Kate's pregnancy and subsequent George across all media by which time we'd almost been married two years. Still no baby news for us.
During this time so many more of our peers had been married themselves, followed by what seemed to us like immediate pregnancy announcements. Please don't get me wrong, we were over the moon for EVERYONE. Truly over the moon for those closest to us.
Before we knew it, Kate and Will's Numero Dos was on its way. As were many of our peers' number twos. It kind of hit home around then. It wasn't happening for us.
It's a strange feeling. Feeling so happy and excited for everyone else and yet so bitter at times, not in the ugly green eyed monster sense (but, yes, maybe that at times). A little bitterness then anger then a strange black emptiness (I am trying my best not to sound too dramatic here but if this blog isn't to be honest, then surely there's no point?) - an emptiness that makes you question everything - What will the future look like? Should we have tried sooner? And then the classic, worst of obligatory questions when life doesn't seem quite fair..."Why me?"
I remember an evening when I'd signed up to sing in a rock choir (as you do!). I'd done so as, even though my work kept me MORE than busy and with a huge production or two on the go at the time and a great social life, I felt I needed something that was just about me, that just took me away from everyone and everything for a little while. Complete escapism. I walked over to the venue straight after work and was in pretty high spirits. I was looking forward to a damn good sing song if I'm honest, something that would feel like a method of alternative therapy.
I'd heard only a few days before of a fabulous friend's pregnancy. Again, we were absolutely over the moon for them but I can't pretend that it wasn't also balanced out by what felt like a huge punch in the face. On that walk over to my new found 'me' time, my phone beeped twice. Two new texts..within moments of one another. PUNCH. A scan picture, "pleased to announce....." followed by...PUNCH...another scan picture with, "pleased to announce."
Now, for fear of losing any of my wonderful friends and family over this (!), I really do have to stress how genuinely excited we were at each announcement. There's absolutely no doubt about that. We are so lucky to be surrounded by so many wonderful people who we love to pieces, and if you're happy, we're happy, if you have some huge, exciting news then it's equally huge and exciting for us too. But I can't pretend that I didn't need a little sit down in between those two text messages. And I'm someone that is pretty bloomin' unshockable by nature! I remember feeling like I didn't know which way to turn. Or what to do with myself. I felt quite alone in that moment. I felt that whilst I had so many people around me, rooting for me, I was suddenly all on my own. Like no-one could possibly understand. I did have a fabulous friend (you know who you are!) who had been through exactly the same however. Twice. Whilst I wouldn't wish what I know she's been through on anyone, it WAS a huge help to know that she had been through all of this and that every single feeling and emotion I was experiencing, she'd been there. I thank you for all those chats and for keeping me sane at times when I wasn't sure how that was possible.
But on this particular occasion I just wanted to speak to my husband. I called him and as we talked it felt like one of those scenes in a film where the protagonists are sat still whilst everyone else is going at a faster pace around them. And it's just the two of you against the world.
My husband is fabulous when it comes to a good old chat. He always tells it exactly as it is and is great at summarising (he's the practical Ying to my waffling Yang!) and at just making you see sense. He's a no nonsense, no bullshit, no drama kind of person. If I need advice on something, he always seems to know what to say. But on this occasion, he just couldn't find the words. He was heartbroken too. There was no rhyme or reason to be found. It was basically just, for want of better words - shit.
Not to just wallow in our what then seemed like a huge sob story, we all know now that our story had an incredibly perfect and magical happy ending. There are of course people who never get their happy ending. I can't even imagine the injustice they must feel and quite frankly I just want to wrap them up in cotton wool and protect them from the rest of the world where they don't receive any scan pictures nor celebrity baby news (to tell a sideways tangent anecdote - the 'OK' magazine I once read whilst in the fertility clinic - mid legs akimbo I might add! - not the clinic's finest hour when it came to their choice of reading material - every celebrity and their ruddy budgie was seemingly pregnant!).
Which brings me back to Kate and Will's baby number three. It is almost a full circle moment for me. Having felt that little affinity with them when our wedding bells rang closely together to the lump in the throat moments prior to what we now know to be the gorgeous George and Charlotte right through to their third pregnancy - the first pregnancy they've announced where I can smile and think, "aw, lovely."
It doesn't quite end there however. Whilst it doesn't feel anywhere as close to the sadness of not knowing whether you will ever have a baby at all, nowhere near as close, there is a tinge of wonder as to whether we too would ever be able to add to OUR brood. We are of course absolutely besotted with our incredible little girl and she is everything we dreamt of and more but I would love for her to have a brother or sister, someone who can always be a great friend to her as my brother always was, and is, to me. It's just not that easy a decision for us. Our decision to add to our family doesn't come from 'trying again' but from sitting down and saying do we choose to finish doing up the house or pay for treatment. It's as cold and callous a decision as that. You may read that and think we seem heartless or shallow putting something so materialistic in the same frame, but then we want a lovely home for our daughter, and are fortunate enough to have that, but we want it finished..and therein lies the moral dilemma. It might seem an obvious decision for many and a no brainer but it's just not that plain and simple. There's all the time out of work for all the prods and pokes, there's the months of hormones and injections, which quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to put my body through again, and there's the generally feeling crap, which I'm not sure I want to bring home, not to our little girl. Fertility or in our case lack of, is without a doubt something NOT to be taken for granted. There are people in my life who I swear only have to sniff sperm and they're pregnant ;) And I'm not being all green eyed monster there, hats (or keks!) off to you!
There's a lot to think about and a lot to consider but I know one thing's for sure, if I could go back to some of those darker days and tell myself that it would all pay off in the end, I would never have believed it. Our little girl is by far worth every second of the crap that we went through. I'd go through it ten times if it meant I got her at the end.
Oh ...and congrats Kate and Wills!
