The Secrets She Keeps

by Michael Robotham

he turned out to be Welsher than a daffodil, with a shock of red hair and a truncated mustache that makes him look like Adolf Hitler’s ginger love child.

I’m none of the above. I’m not particularly pretty, nor am I plain. “Unthreatening” is probably the right word. I’m the less attractive friend that all pretty girls need because I won’t steal their limelight and will happily take their leftovers (food and boyfriends).

Jack and I have skirmishes rather than battles. We are like Cold War diplomats who say nice things to each other while secretly stockpiling ammunition.

Most of the guys were drunk, checking out the teenage girls in their crotch-defying dresses and fuck-me heels. I feel sorry for hookers these days—how do they stand out anymore?

My love for a child will be greater than my love for an adult because it is a singular love that isn’t based on physical attraction, or shared experiences, or the pleasures of intimacy, or time together. It is unconditional, immeasurable, unshakeable.

Anyone who says that honesty is the best policy is living in la-la land. Either that or they have never been married or had children. Parents lie to their kids all the time—about sex, drugs, death, and a hundred other things. We lie to those we love to protect their feelings. We lie because that’s what love means, whereas unfettered honesty is cruel and the height of self-indulgence.

She says I should reach out and build bridges, but I think certain bridges are meant to burn and it’s a shame some people can’t be on them when it happens.

Jack anticipates problems in advance and prepares for the worst, marshaling the resources to handle things. I take problems as they come, bending rather than breaking.

I’m struggling with this—not because of political correctness or the idea that I’ll be judged by other mothers as being “too posh to push.”

“Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper,”

People who have children seem to regard infertility as being an outdated condition, like smallpox or the plague. They think it was cured long ago by IVF and surrogacy and that anyone settling for childlessness is weak-willed and ignoble. They’re wrong. Science offers no safety net. Only one in four fertility treatments results in a live birth, and once a woman reaches thirty-five the odds get even worse.

What makes me sad is listening to mothers sitting around, swapping stories, complaining about their sleepless nights, or teething troubles, or the expenses, or the germs, or the tantrums. How dare they complain? They are blessed. Chosen. Lucky.

“Give that girl an inch and she thinks she’s a ruler,”

Some men get funny about babies because they think a woman only has a finite amount of love to give, but it’s not about dividing or subtracting or making do with less. Our hearts expand. We have double the love, maybe more.

There is nothing sexier than a man with a baby. It doesn’t feminize or weaken him—it makes him look like a good provider and a role model, someone who will stick around.

Losing a baby is so fundamental and shocking, surely there must be tangible evidence. I can feel the hole inside me.

The value of a secret depends upon whom you’re trying to keep it from. You may think it’s worth a lot. I may think it’s worthless. Someone always has to pay.”

How dare I complain. I was born in the right time and right place to the right family. I met a man and we built a life together. Yet sometimes even the most charmed existence can change in the blink of an eye, or turn on the length of an eyelash. One moment of indecision. A cancer cell. A rogue gene. A wrong turn. A red light. A drunk driver. A cruel piece of misfortune.

But you’re not the first woman who couldn’t fall pregnant, and infertility isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’ll tell you what’s worse. Having a child go missing is worse. Lying awake at night, not knowing if he’s alive or dead. You have an empty womb. I had an empty cradle. Mine is worse.”

We need the darkness to appreciate the light, and the bumps along the road to stop us falling asleep at the wheel.