I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children': author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

"There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately because I've never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child."

"I became able to communicate in acronyms impenetrable to anyone who hadn't held a dozen ovulation sticks in a dozen urine streams, and it is all so long ago now that I only remember one: 2WW. At first I took this to be some dry reference to the second world war, since they did seem to be always in battle, these women, or in flight but in fact it refers to the two-week wait, the fearful, hopeful days between sex and ovulation."

"During this time, I began to picture myself raising a boy as sweet and funny as my husband, and became prone to sentimental visions; one morning I imagined a row of small socks drying on a radiator and burst into tears. My desire to conceive became equal to my prior horror of conception, and when I failed to become pregnant I was indignant, as if for the first time in my life I'd flunked an exam."

She had long rejected motherhood but at age 30 experienced a sudden, intense desire to have a child and immediately began trying with her husband. Months without success led her to online fertility forums where she learned acronyms and obsessively tracked ovulation and pregnancy signs. She entered the anxious two-week wait between intercourse and ovulation, monitoring ambiguous symptoms that could signal success or failure. She imagined domestic scenes and a son resembling her husband, felt sentimental and tearful, and equated failing to conceive with personal failure, experiencing indignation and distress.

Read at www.theguardian.com