...can't have children

When Pitter-Pattering Feet will only ever be ghosts of what could have been...

Picture the Fairy Tale: Little girl grows up, falls in love, gets married and lives happily ever after. Something all little girls dream about - and perhaps for many of us out there - is to live happily ever after whatever that entails for the individual. And for Lena* hers was meant to be to have a family.

She met her Prince five years ago and at 22 was a young but blushing bride. Her parents were divorced but it had never fazed her about getting hitched herself and on her wedding day, I asked her why she was so set on being married now and not using the money on holidays to exotic places and such. “You have a lifetime to get married” I said. And her reply:

“I can’t have kids. And for me this is like announcing how in love we are to the world.”

Lena has Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and was diagnosed a long time ago. It means that it is unlikely she will ever conceive a child naturally. I know there are lots of revenues one can go down such as IVF and adoption, but those things cost time and money. And I don’t think that is the main problem. It’s the anger – the sinking feeling of failure that as a woman you cannot do what you were meant to do.

It’s a sad, horrible truth that some women will never be able to have a natural baby – and a sadder truth that there are just as many who can, do and don’t want their children.

I’d had this conversation with Lena over and over again, and sometimes I wonder at whether she has accepted this or not. I guess that it helps the fact that I and our other childhood friend have yet to start a family – and her other friends that have are nearing thirty.  But I worry about what will happen when we do. How much heartache would that cause her?

I asked her to consider adoption or possibly surrogacy but she refuses. She says she wants her own baby – one she grows herself I suppose. And to each her own.

However I wish she’d consider it, partly because I want her to be happy. I want her to have the life she has always wanted, and if that is with the pitter-patter of feet rushing around then let that be so. She makes a good aunt, a good god-mother but can that ever be enough?

And as we grow older, as we mature and live through our twenties and then our thirties – how will the world spin then? Will the tear filled phones become more frequent? Or will acceptance set in and Lena will become a great wife, with a fantastic life of dreams she has yet to think up of?