for a child of my own.
I went for the obligatory counselling session and then booked an appointment to have an abortion. But when I woke up on the appointed morning, I phoned the clinic and said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m not coming. I can’t do it.’
When I told Tom’s parents that I’d cancelled my appointment, his dad mumbled something gruffly kind and patted my shoulder, and his mother enveloped me in a warm, breath-expelling hug and, with tears in her eyes, repeated her promise that they’d help us in any way they could. And although none of us could have known it at the time, it was a promise for which I was one day going to be immeasurably grateful.
I had a horrendous pregnancy, and at about four months I fainted again. Tom was with me this time and he rushed me into hospital, weaving through the traffic and sounding the horn of his van in a way I’d never seen him do before. Despite his efforts, though, I was bleeding by the time we reached the hospital, and the doctor told me I was going into early labour. It seemed that all my worst nightmares were coming true. I’d been so afraid of being pregnant and of becoming a parent that I’d almost had an abortion. But I’d changed my mind, because, in the end, my own fears hadn’t seemed to constitute an adequate reason for snuffing out a life that was only just beginning. And it was only then, when I’d made the decision to go ahead with the pregnancy, that I’d realised how desperately I wanted the child that was growing inside me. I knew Tom wanted it too, and that he’d tried to convince himself that he’d come to terms with the possibility of never having a son or daughter of his own simply because he loved me.
What made what was happening even more difficult to bear was the fact that I thought I was almost through the most dangerous period of my pregnancy, and I’d only just dared to allow myself to start believing that I might actually be going to carry my baby to full term. For the last few weeks, I’d felt sick most of the time, and although the constant nausea and occasional bouts of vomiting were really hard to live with every day, I’d comforted myself with the thought that perhaps they were good signs, because at least they probably meant that my hormones were doing what they ought to be doing.
In the hospital, they gave me drugs to try to prevent my going into labour prematurely. I knew that babies born at four months couldn’t survive, and it was clear that they didn’t really hold out much hope. But, by some miracle, the contractions gradually became less frequent and finally stopped, and the following day I was allowed to go home.
Everything seemed to settle down after that. The rest of my pregnancy was relatively uneventful and I went into labour two weeks after my due date.
The labour itself was horrible. Tom held my hand, wiped away the sweat that was streaming out of every pore in my body, and counted ‘In – two – three; out – two – three – four,’ as I tried to breathe away the pain and suppress the panic. But it soon became clear that no amount of controlled breathing was going to push the baby out of my body, and I was given a spinal block so that it could be literally dragged out of me with forceps. And, ironically, it was at that point that Tom forgot to follow the breathing technique he’d been counting out so carefully for me, and he fainted and had to be half-carried out of the room. Which meant that, sadly, he wasn’t there to see our child emerge into the world or to hear its first feeble cry.
Immediately the baby was born, it was whisked away to a corner of the delivery room, and I lay back, exhausted, on the bed, listening and waiting for the more vigorous wailing I knew would begin as soon its tiny lungs had filled with air.
The seconds and then the minutes ticked by, and still the only sounds I could hear were the hushed, urgent voices of the doctor and one of the nurses. Eventually, I lifted my head to try to see what they were doing, and – because, for some reason, no one had thought to tell me – asked, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’
For a moment, no one answered. Then a nurse walked towards me, placed a tightly wrapped bundle on my chest and said, ‘It’s a boy,’ and I looked down for the first time into the huge blue eyes and wrinkled, blue-tinged face of my son.
The doctor came and stood beside the bed. ‘He’s having some problems breathing,’ he told me. ‘We need to get him into intensive care.’ He leaned towards me and reached out to lift the baby from my arms, and I just had time to touch the skin of my son’s cheek and whisper ‘Hello’ before he was rushed out of the room.
Because of the spinal anaesthetic I’d been given, I had to lie flat on my back for the next 24 hours, which meant that I couldn’t get out of bed to have a shower, and when my mother came in to see me, she took one look at my tangled, matted hair, said, ‘Look at the state of you!’ and burst into tears. It wasn’t the greeting I’d expected, but I think she’d been more worried about me and about the baby than I’d realised.
For the next few minutes, she concentrated on getting me tidied up and ‘presentable’, which was probably her way of dealing with the sudden rush of relief and emotion she was feeling.
As soon as I was able to get out of bed, I had a wash and waited for my son to be brought in to me so that I could feed him. When the nurse handed him to me, I felt nervous and excited. I pulled back the edge of the blanket the baby was wrapped in and looked down into a huge, moon-like face framed by a shock of bright red hair.
‘This isn’t my child!’ I told the nurse.
‘Of course he’s your child,’ she said. Her tone was briskly coaxing, as though she was speaking to a small child or a very stupid adult. Then she gave a quick, nervous laugh and patted my shoulder as she added, ‘Who else’s child would he be? Isn’t he just the spitting image of his father?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He may well look exactly like his father.’ I spoke slowly, trying to control the hysteria and panic that were rising up inside me. ‘But I’ve never seen his father, because this isn’t my child. My child doesn’t have red hair and he’s less than half the size of this baby.’
‘There, there.’ The nurse’s tone was so patronisingly patient that I had a strong, but mercifully fleeting, desire to throw the baby at her. She looked at me warily, patted my shoulder again and assured me, ‘He is your baby. There’s no question about that.’
Suddenly, all the pain, worry and exhaustion of the last few hours hit me with full force and I burst into tears. I didn’t have the strength to argue with her, but I knew that if I didn’t, I was going to go home with someone else’s baby – and, even more importantly, someone else was going to go home with mine.
At that moment, another nurse strode purposefully down the ward towards us, holding another, slightly smaller, white bundle in her arms.
‘Well, here we are, Mummy!’ she said, in a no-nonsense, nursery-teacher’s voice. ‘Here’s your little one all ready for his first feed.’
As she spoke, she reached across and almost snatched the red-haired monster of a baby from my arms, deftly replacing him with my son. Then both nurses turned and scuttled away, and I looked down for the second time at my baby and couldn’t believe how beautiful he was.
When Tom came into the hospital later that day, he was like the cat that got the cream. I was touched by his obvious and immediate love for his son, and by his gratitude to me for having given him the child he could only now admit to having wanted.
Over the next couple of days, we tried to decide on a name. While I was pregnant, we’d already narrowed down our choices of boys’ names to either Daniel or Richard. But the more we looked at our baby, the less the names seemed to suit him, and eventually we agreed on Sam. I wasn’t sure whether he really looked like a Sam, but everyone else seemed to
