Read Online The Choice by Bernadette Bohan - Free Book Online Page B

have two lovely children – a boy and a girl – and that is more than most people have. Go home and live your life.’
This was his standard answer. Pregnancy might kick-start the cancer again. Cancer could kill me. Having another baby could tear my family apart. I knew he would shake his head and intone the same deadpan response each time I saw him, but each time I knew I would have to ask him the same question. I was obeying an inner compulsion sharper than hunger; stronger than desire. My head told me I was foolish to imagine I could have another child, yet my heart longed for a baby.
For seven years I never gave up hoping that one day he’d ‘give me permission’. I prayed that there would be some new scientific discovery – some new drug perhaps – that would enable me to carry a child to term without making myself sick or losing the baby. I was desperate for someone with a PhD to claim that pregnancy never triggered the growth of cancer cells. Or I needed a test to prove that my kind of cancer was caused by something entirely different.
I think it is something that anyone who has lost a baby will understand, that yearning to fill the empty place the unknown baby should have filled. How I wondered about that lost child: who it would have looked like, how it would have been with three children running around. I came from a large family – it was a natural thing for me to expect a big family for myself. I liked to think of him or her as my special guardian angel who had been with me for such a short time, giving me hope and comfort in the dark days of fear as I waited for the diagnosis, then quietly taking its leave of me to allow me, eventually, to be healed. Some people believe that children choose their parents – that they are souls that come to us to fulfil a need in us as much as in them. I don’t know about this, but I did believe that it was all part of God’s purpose, and who was I to question it?
Not that I was obsessed, you understand. I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t about to rob another woman of her child if I saw it in a pram in the supermarket. I felt nothing approaching the way friends of mine who have been trying unsuccessfully for a baby for many years feel. In the same way that I had learned to live with cancer, accept it, and take what good I could from the experience, I learned to live with this loss. The void would always be there, and the space I had set aside in my heart for another child was simply a fact of life. I took out all of Sarah’s pretty little baby and toddler clothes which I had carefully packed away for a younger sibling. I held them to my cheek and inhaled what was left of her babyhood, mourning my lost third child who would never wear them. Then I washed and ironed them and gave them away. Toys and books that were gathering dust, never to be held by the chubby little fingers of a child of mine again – they all went too. After all, how could I jeopardize the life that I had fought so hard to keep? No, I knew I had to move forward, embrace life with outstretched arms and enjoy what I was so fortunate to have been given. Ger was happy as we were, and was anxious for me not to worry about having another baby. ‘Look, love, put it out of your mind – it’s not going to happen. Don’t rock the boat.’ I knew this was right, and sometimes I would give myself little pep talks: ‘Come on Bernie now, get a grip. You’re doing fine. Your kids are doing fine. You don’t need another child.’ I reluctantly accepted that it was not to be. But the want never disappeared.
So I got on with living my life, as women do. With so much going on in the house with my young children I couldn’t mope around, and besides I’m a real doer – I hate sitting around doing nothing.
In May 1994 we had four weddings to go to: one was a family wedding and the others were colleagues of