You Let Me In

by Lucy Clarke

My house is my sanctuary: uncluttered, ordered. Everything has its place – and that gives me a sense of security, of calm.

‘The best story to tell – the only story to tell – is the one living within you, inhabiting you, insisting that it be heard.’

I’d once imagined his hands on the swell of my abdomen, feeling the kicks of our baby. I pictured them linked through a daughter’s arm as he walked her down an aisle or clasping a son to him. I imagined these hands wrinkled and gnarled, still holding mine.

I would find myself on a different bathroom floor, another pregnancy test gripped in my fist, the pale blue cross markedly absent. For the twelfth time, the thirteenth time, the fourteenth …

I’d no idea that the yearning to have a baby growing inside me, to feel the butterfly kicks within my womb like a secret, would be so powerful that it would seem like a hunger.

I’d no idea that it would strike me almost daily – when I would see a heavily pregnant woman sitting at the table next to me in a café, or when I’d watch a mother buttoning her small child inside a coat, or when I’d have to celebrate a frien...

After all, this is my story. It is up to me how I tell it.