"Try hard enough, we are often told, and eventually you'll get what you want. But sometimes the hardest - and bravest - thing to do, is to stop trying. After years of hoping to start a family, including the painful rollercoaster of fertility treatment and a devastating miscarriage on Christmas day, Caroline Stafford, found the only way to find some kind of peace again was to accept it was not going to happen and to build a different future."
"Like many people, Caroline and her husband Gareth, who she met at school, took it almost for granted they would have children in due course. "We spend all our lives trying not to get pregnant. I just assumed as soon as I wasn't trying not to, I would," she says. Caroline Stafford Nearly one in five women in the UK do not have children. That can be for a variety of reasons, including personal choice."
"At the same time she watched as her friends fell pregnant and had babies of their own. "We were absolutely delighted for them, but the truth was, it was the worst thing to hear," she tells Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett. For anyone in Caroline's situation, simply seeing a parent with a pram can be painful, the source of a gnawing envy. That feeling ate away at her, changing who she was. "Your world view becomes smaller and often more negative."
Caroline Stafford and her husband Gareth assumed they would have children and stopped avoiding pregnancy. After a year without conceiving they consulted a GP and underwent IVF in the UK and further cycles abroad, enduring anxious appointments, medications and injections. A miscarriage on Christmas Day compounded the grief, while watching friends become parents triggered envy and narrowed Caroline's worldview. She experienced changing feelings toward others and pressure from the prevailing "don't give up" narrative. She ultimately accepted that parenthood was unlikely, ceased treatment, and chose to build a different future.
Read at www.bbc.com
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