Hi Annie33, I believe it takes real bravery to accept egg donation from someone you don’t know. Due to my ethnic background, it took many months to
find someone suited to my eggs but now they have found a woman who is. I really think it’s God’s will that two strangers can have such a magical relationship, and one day your child
will understand how much you want to be a mum, and thank you for the journey you have been through. Rainbow Girl
I wish Sofia could read this, Lou thinks. Then she might not be so cynical.
* * *
‘We’ll see you back at the house, shall we?’ says Cath.
Rich turns to his father-in-law. ‘Fancy another, Peter? They’ll be a while, I’ll bet.’
Peter drains his pint. ‘Same again, please.’
‘Looks as if it’s going to be a nice afternoon,’ says Judy, as she and Cath step outside the pub. After raining all morning, the sky reveals promising patches of blue.
‘Let’s do the circular route by the gorge, shall we?’ says Cath. Her parents have lived in the Yorkshire Dales since Cath and her brother were small, and the walk is a family
favourite.
‘It’s so nice to have someone to go with,’ says Judy, once they’re out of earshot. Anything but a short stroll is too much for Peter these days, but Judy is younger and
fitter than her husband.
Cath leads the way through a gate and into a field. It’s peppered with sheep, heads down grazing. The gradient rises gently on either side, a stream cuts through the meadow, tall grasses
dampen their legs. They stroll in companionable silence at first, getting into the rhythm. After a while, gentle undulations give way to more dramatic crags and outcrops, and as they follow the
line of the stream, stepping from stone to stone, their conversation mirrors their movements, jumping from one shared interest to another. Cath tells Judy news of friends her mother is fond of;
Judy updates Cath on the latest dramas involving Cath’s brother, Mike, and his wife, Sukey. They share a moan about Sukey, whom they both find difficult. ‘No wonder those boys are
hyperactive,’ says Cath. ‘Their mother’s an exercise junkie.’
They could natter all afternoon, but if Cath is going to tackle the subject, she’d better get on with it. She glances at her mother before she begins. Judy’s expression is a half
smile, eyes crinkled up in the brightness. Her grey hair is swept up in its customary bun, a few wisps fall about her still quietly beautiful face; her purple anorak is unzipped, hands swing in
time with her step. She’s as relaxed as she’ll ever be.
‘There’s something I want to let you know, Mum.’
‘Oh?’
‘You know when they operated to remove the tumour?’
‘Ye-es . . . ’
Cath knows her mother doesn’t like talking about her cancer. At the time, Judy seemed better dealing with the practicalities than talking about it openly. Presumably she found it too
upsetting; nonetheless, given their closeness, Cath found it hard. She reminds her, ‘Well, they left my cervix and uterus.’
‘So they did.’
They’re entering a narrow ravine. Great slabs of grey rise far above their heads, cut crossways and vertical by centuries of running water, like giant building blocks. Cath looks up in the
hope they might lend her some of their strength. ‘It means I can carry a baby.’ Even saying this chokes her up, she wants it so terribly.
Judy says nothing. Cath wishes she’d react. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says eventually. ‘I didn’t think you could.’
Cath steadies her voice and explains about using another woman’s eggs. That they’re walking helps her compose herself; it’s as if each stride brings with it a touch more
clarity, helping formulate thoughts.
When she’s through, Judy says, ‘Well, I suppose the same stubbornness that got you through your cancer should see you through this.’
Cath should probably ignore the criticism, but can’t resist. ‘Dad always says I get my obstinacy from you.’
‘Good grief, Cath!’ Judy bursts out. ‘Have you really thought about it? You’d be going through something similar all over again. You’ll be back in waiting rooms,
having tests, having treatment.’
‘But I won’t be a cancer patient.’ Why can’t her mother see it?
‘Having a baby, it’s a lot to put your body through.’
‘I’m so much better than I was.’ For months following her operation, Cath’s whole world shrank to her bedroom and going to the hospital for chemotherapy: the most she
could take in was daytime TV; even reading was too taxing. Very occasionally between treatments, she could just muster the strength to get to the end of the street for a coffee with Rich to support
her. Then when it was all over, she felt very down. Yet she pulled herself out of that too. In comparison she feels a new woman. ‘Honestly. I managed skiing before Christmas, and I never
thought I would.’
‘But you still have days, don’t you, pet, when you get ever so tired?’
Her mother has a point. Even though she’s been back at work for ages, until recently Cath would find she’d overdone it somehow, get all shaky and distressed, and have to collapse
into bed. The experience would send her right back to the time of having chemo.
‘I haven’t had a day like that since the autumn.’
Judy shakes her head. ‘That’s not very long. Have you any idea how dreadful being pregnant can make you feel? I was sick as a dog with both of you.’
‘I’ve heaps of friends who’ve been through it. And there’s Sukey.’ Maybe comparing herself to her sister-in-law isn’t a good idea. Sukey is super-fit and
several years younger. ‘Don’t you want another grandchild, Mum?’
‘Of course I do. You know I’d like that very much. I think you and Rich would make great parents, I’ve always thought that. And you’ve got a real knack with
children.’
‘Have I?’ Cath is surprised to hear her mother say this. Judy is not usually one for overt compliments.
‘Oh yes. When I think of you with Alfie and Dom for instance. Plus of course, I’m very fond of Rich . . . ’ Judy falls quiet as she concentrates on climbing over some
particularly awkward rocks. When she reaches a flat boulder, she stops to look across at her daughter. ‘Though it wouldn’t be genetically my grandchild, would it?’
Ouch, thinks Cath. That really hurt, especially after the mention of her nephews. ‘But I’d be the one carrying it.’
‘I mean biologically.’
‘Well . . . it would be Rich’s genetically, but the baby would still be mine. And actually, in some ways, it might be a blessing if we weren’t genetically connected. If the
cancer I had is hereditary, I won’t pass it on to them.’ Having decided to air the subject, there’s little point in avoiding this detail.
‘Couldn’t you adopt?’
‘I have thought about it, but it’s so tricky in the UK, especially if you’re white – there aren’t enough babies.’
‘What about an older child?’
But I want OUR baby!
Cath longs to scream, but she must try to take this slowly, however testing her mother is being. ‘I’m just not sure I could take on an older child who
might have all sorts of emotional problems.’
‘It might be a lot less tough than going through this IVF treatment you seem to be planning. You’ll need time off work again.’
‘Mum, I don’t think you understand. I want
Rich’s
child.’
‘And it’s more drugs. You’ve been pumped full of so many already.’
‘I’m sick of being seen as a cancer victim!’ snaps Cath. ‘It’s not the same sort of treatment, and I wish you would stop comparing them. You know the worst thing
about cancer? I felt out of place here’ – she waves at their surroundings – ‘in the normal world. I couldn’t go for walks like this – or anywhere. I
couldn’t make plans – not even for the next day. I couldn’t pop into town. I couldn’t draw, or make pots. I couldn’t even come and see you without Rich to drive me.
And I certainly couldn’t think about having children. Every time I did, I had to push the thought away – it was awful.’ She swallows. She mustn’t cry, it won’t help
– her mother will think she’s just being over-emotional. She keeps talking. ‘And all around me my friends were having babies, Alfie and Dom were growing up . . . I felt like I was
living in some sort of time warp. For two years, everyone else’s lives were moving on, and mine had stopped.’
Judy sighs. ‘It wasn’t fun for any of us.’ She turns to face forward again, focuses on moving upstream.
It’s the closest her mother has come to admitting her feelings about Cath’s illness. But this isn’t the time to work through Judy’s reaction to the past; Cath is
determined to convey her hopes and dreams without giving the impression they’re just a fantasy. It’s quite a tightrope to be walking. Presently, Judy pauses to catch her breath and Cath
stops alongside her, touches her shoulder, remembering. ‘It was a hideous start to married life, Rich helping me in and out of the bath, shopping and cooking for me.’
‘I suppose . . . ’
‘He even had to clear up my sick.’ Cath shudders. The physical symptoms weren’t the worst of it. Once the chemo was over, she had rushes of panic – without seeing doctors
and nurses almost daily, she felt adrift between check-ups. Suddenly she’d experience an alarming flurry of emotions, like bats whooshing from a cave. Her thoughts would fly this way and
that, contradictory, uncontrollable: she’d be desperate to turn her mind off, but the more she tried, the more panicked she’d feel.
‘Rich helped us all get through it,’ says Judy.
Cath nods. Sometimes she wonders how her mother and father would have coped had Rich not been around. ‘But since the beginning of this year, I guess, it’s like I’ve wanted to
set the clock ticking again.’
As they emerge from the gorge onto the hilltop, they can see the vast sweep of the landscape before them, north, south, east and west. Up here it’s bleak and windswept, yet only just below
are lush pastures edged with trees, and there, glistening blue in the distant sunlight, is Malham Tarn. Where else in the world offers such diversity of hill and valley, shape and scene as
Yorkshire? Cath wonders. The public image of the Dales is far more saccharine than the reality: TV and postcards do no justice to the scale of the place. For all its scores of picturesque villages,
from this standpoint there’s barely a dwelling in sight.
‘You know what, Mum,’ she says. ‘For thousands of years, women have been having babies. Babies have been conceived in fields and forests, just like those over there, and in
beds and cars and hotel rooms. They’re having babies in films, on telly, in books . . . My friends – even bloody Sukey – everyone is at it. Women conceive, carry, and give birth
every day. Except me.’
Ultimately, she wants to explain, my desire for a baby is not about drugs, or cancer, or anything Rich and I or you or anyone else in my family has experienced as a result of my cancer
treatment. It’s about a longing so deep and intense that it’s hard to express adequately out loud.
She takes a deep breath. ‘I know it’s difficult, Mum, but
we
need to do this, Rich and I. All that energy, all that time we spent getting through my illness. I’m fed up
of being defined by what’s happened to me, I want a new reason for living – and I want that reason not just to be about me. I want to put someone else and their needs ahead of mine for
a change. Maybe it’s selfish, but if I am, then so is half the world – they all want to have children too. Or maybe it’s just I’ve got so much love to give and I don’t
want it to go to waste. I don’t want to be rattling round the house in a few years just the two of us, feeling lonely and that something is missing. I want to show my child this blue sky and
these dales’ – she sweeps her hand around again. ‘And, though he’d never say so, Rich bought into something when he married me, and he got short-changed, or that’s how
it seems. So I want to give him something back, after everything he’s done for me. I think he’d make such a great dad. All that caring he gave me – just imagine what he’d be
like with a small person.’
Judy is taking in the view, but Cath can tell from the furrow between her brows that she is also doing her best to absorb what she has just heard. That she’s trying so hard makes Cath
appreciate another reason. ‘You know, it’s about you too. If you weren’t such a good mum, I wouldn’t want to be one, not with all the effort it’s going to take, would
I?’
By now Judy’s hair is barely contained by its clip; daddy-long-legs tendrils blow this way and that. As she turns briskly away and starts back down the gentler slope of hillside, Cath
thinks she glimpses that her mother is also trying to mask tears. Or maybe it’s just the wind, making her eyes water.
‘She seems a lot happier, our Cath,’ says Peter, settling into his armchair.
Rich takes his seat on the sofa. ‘She does.’
‘Looks so much better, too. Lovely to see her smiling again.’
‘I know. That skiing holiday did her the world of good.’
‘Fancy watching the cricket?’ Peter is such an ardent fan that he subscribes to a sports channel to watch it all year round.
‘Excellent idea,’ says Rich.
Peter reaches for the remote, flicks on the television. It’s an ad break. He turns down the volume, then says, ‘You know what her mother would really love her to do? She’s
convinced it would help her feel better.’
Is it possible that Judy has arrived at the same conclusion they have? Cath has asked Rich to have a word with her father – Rich is unsure how to broach the subject.
‘Take up pottery again.’
‘Ah.’ Rich struggles to catch this curve ball.
‘She was always the creative one,’ says Peter; Rich assumes he’s also referring to Cath’s brother, Mike. ‘That job hardly stretches her.’
‘No . . . But they were very supportive when she was ill.’
‘I think Judy appreciates that.’
‘And she’s got some good friends at the gallery.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting for a moment she give that up. It just seems a shame for her talent to go to waste.’
Rich has to agree. Judy and Peter are clearly very proud of their daughter – their bungalow is full of pots and jugs and mugs and plates she’s made over the years. ‘I could
mark the stages of my daughter’s life through the evolution in her design,’ Judy had said to Rich on his first visit. She’d insisted on talking him through the whole collection:
the witch Cath had made at primary school, its careful sculpture marked by such enthusiastic splodges of coloured glaze that they almost hid the first signs of her gift. The tall, elegant vase
she’d shaped only the second time she ever used the wheel – ‘I remember her teacher was
so
excited when I came to collect her,’ Judy had confided. ‘He told me
he’d never known a child achieve something so accomplished at such a young age.’ Then there were the experiments and shocks from art school, and finally a couple of pieces in the
understated whites and pale greys of the porcelain she’d made her trademark for the few years she worked as a professional. Cath had been mortified by her mother’s showing-off, but
knowing Judy better now, Rich realizes overt expression of admiration is not her usual way. For him, it merely underlined how enthusiastic his in-laws were. Yet Cath had already stopped potting by
the time they met.