The Solo Mum

My birth story: covid, contractions, and cord complications.

31st January 20241st February 2024by Lola JimenezLeave a Comment

My birth story: covid, contractions, and cord complications.

I’ve been asked several times to share Alba’s birth story, but I’ve chosen not to until now because I was still processing the fact that she very nearly didn’t make it. I’ve only just started to let it go, but I feel quite let down by the fact that nobody listened when I knew something was wrong. I want this story to encourage anyone who has any concerns about their pregnancy to go and get checked out in person by a midwife or obstetrician – it could save your baby.

Alba was born on the morning of Saturday 4th November, but on the Monday prior I tested positive for covid. I’d been fine just hours before, but all of a sudden I had the shivers and was shaking violently. Being heavily pregnant my best friend Anna (who I called for help) decided to call 111. They sent an ambulance to my address who checked me over and said my heart rate and oxygen levels were ok and that they weren’t concerned enough to take me into hospital. I explained that my baby had been doing somersaults, going round and round, and that this was not typical for my baby girl who had been head down since before my 20 week ultrasound. The paramedics assured me that this was insignificant and that the baby was just responding to the discomfort I was feeling. They told me that if I really wanted they could take me in, but that due to having covid the hospital wouldn’t really want me there, especially given that my readings for heart rate and oxygen were normal. I was advised to stay home and hydrate, rest and just let my midwife know what was going on in the morning. It was quite late at night and with Daniel already disrupted by the arrival of the paramedics I decided to take their advice.

The following morning I called the hospital. Since the shakes had stopped I was experiencing quite intense contraction type pains and the baby had only moved once in that time, so I spoke to a midwife from my team to explain all of this. I shared my concerns about foetal movements as well as the pains that I had been experiencing and she told me that as I had already been admitted previously with agitated uterus, the covid would have just exacerbated those symptoms and that I just had to rest until my planned induction a week and a half later.

After my call to the midwife on the Tuesday, I spent the next three days in excruciating pain. I was struggling to care for Daniel through a mixture of covid symptoms, contraction pains, and the SPD that had already been impacting my mobility for months. I wasn’t sleeping either so I was completely exhausted. At one point I remember speaking to Anna on the phone and saying “surely they can’t let me go another week like this? Surely they will have to bring my induction forward? But then again if they do I won’t have childcare for Daniel”. Another situation that needed managing was the fact that my entire support network are clinically vulnerable, and with me testing positive it was just a matter of time before Daniel was covid positive too. I’m actually quite surprised I didn’t have a heart attack or something because my pain and stress levels were through the roof at this point.

On the Friday I laid down with Daniel for a nap, but as I got up to use the toilet I felt a warm trickle down my leg. I wasn’t sure it was enough for broken waters but there were a few indicators that it could have been and I’d had a few similar incidents in the days prior. When your waters trickle and don’t fish it’s actually really hard to know that they’ve ruptured as by that point of pregnancy you pretty much pee yourself every twenty minutes too! My waters with Daniel broke at the back so it trickled for days before I even realised that they had ruptured so I shared my suspicions with the midwife on the other end of the maternity helpline and she said I needed to go in and have the fluid tested. We made a plan for Anna to stay with Daniel until we knew what was going on, and then if I had to stay in hospital that Daniel would stay with his godparents.

On arrival at the hospital I was kept in a side room and asked to double mask, but after a while they told me I was no longer contagious due to being five days positive and moved me back to join the rest of the patients in the main ward. The consultant examined me and suggested that there was no fluid leaking, but a swab was tested and this indicated amniotic fluid. They all agreed my waters had been trickling and that I needed to be induced that night given my concerns about reduced movement and the fact that I was in so much pain.

Last perinaise and chips of the pregnancy!

I was moved to a room of my own, where Anna joined me with chip shop chips and Nando’s perinaise sauce (my third trimester pregnancy craving!). I was induced at around midnight and a few hours later the pain was beyond anything I had experienced before. I could hardly stand to use the toilet and it was definitely more painful than when I was induced with Daniel. Once my cervix started dilating the midwife wasn’t convinced my waters had actually broken either, but the process had been started so we were going to see it through. I was adamant about having an epidural right away, as with Daniel’s birth I was left waiting for hours, so they moved me to the delivery suite quite quickly once things progressed.

I was told that the anaesthetist was waiting for me on the delivery suite as I wasn’t prepared to leave my gas and air behind on the ward without pain relief ready to go. However on arrival they weren’t actually ready and the handover of my care felt like it took forever. I remember crying, unable to find a position that offered relief and then suddenly my waters popped, confirming that there was just a leak before. I had about half a second of relief from the pressure after that, but then the contractions began again, closed together and more intense than before. We’ll just skip the bit about how I screamed and shouted, telling the maternity team that I couldn’t understand why they weren’t helping me and to hurry up and just give me all of the drugs Eventually I was given a spinal tap, followed by an epidural, and I mellowed immediately. Honestly I went from Exorcist to Care Bear in a matter of seconds but the midwives were laughing as apparently my ‘pain personality’ wasn’t particularly uncommon.

Once I was all prepped, they told me that I was fully dilated, put a clip on the baby’s head to monitor her heart rate, and explained that they were going to leave me for a couple of hours to give the baby a chance to travel as far down the birth canal as possible. They said this was standard and helped to prevent the baby turning during labour which could result in an unplanned Caesarian section. This made perfect sense, and as I was now warm and fuzzy from the epidural I smiled and waved them off.

Just a few minutes after leaving however, the midwives returned looking quite serious. They could see from their monitors outside that my baby was in distress and that I needed to push straight away to get her out. I began pushing at 10.27am. After the first push or two the midwives explained that the umbilical cord was wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck and they had to get in there to try and loosen it or create some slack so that I could push the baby out without causing further distress or loss of blood flow. They told me she really needed to come out quickly and knowing I didn’t want a c-section suggested I follow their lead and push with everything I had. So I did.

My mind went into overdrive. I immediately went to the night Alba was doing somersaults and the paramedics wrote it off as a ‘response to my distress’. I shared this with the midwife supporting me through delivery and she was shocked, suggesting that paramedics are not qualified to make decisions about the well-being of unborn babies, and that I should have been taken in then. I also told her that a midwife had blamed my agitated uterus and she again reaffirmed that a change in foetal movements warranted a once over on the maternity ward.

Alba was born at 10.47am, after just twenty minutes of pushing, although with all the adrenaline it felt like about five minutes. We had immediate skin to skin with delayed cord clamping, and I was just completely overwhelmed to be holding her in my arms after the fear that she might not have been ok. The midwife asked if she could deliver the placenta for me and I barely remember this given that I was focused on Alba and couldn’t feel a thing down there thanks to my epidural. Anna did try to take a photo of the placenta, but somehow it ended up just being a shot of my bloody vagina so we deleted that gory little horror from my phone! I had also torn again this time, another second degree tear, and needed stitches too.

It took days after Alba’s birth to stop feeling shaken up by the fact that she could have died before she was born. I still feel quite uneasy about it now if I’m honest. Had I not trusted my gut and pushed that my waters were leaking (even though I wasn’t really sure) I would have had to wait another week for my planned induction, by which time given the contractions I was having potentially putting pressure on Alba’s blood and oxygen flow, she might not have been born alive. To be clear, nuchal cord (when the umbilical cord is looped around the baby’s neck) is not always a concern, but it becomes dangerous when contractions cause tightening to restrict the flow of blood and oxygen. I had been having contractions for almost a week before Alba was born and her movements were notably reduced. I’m so grateful and feel so blessed that I got to bring her home as I know that sometimes this isn’t the case, but I can’t help feeling let down by those who gave me a substandard level of care and fobbed me off just because I had covid. We heard about how covid affected pregnant women during lockdown, but it seems that it’s still having an impact on our maternity experiences, with covid positive pregnant women being persuaded to stay away from the hospital instead of seeking the care that we really should be getting. There was a very clear contrast in how seriously my concerns were taken before and after I tested positive for covid, and the difference could have cost me my baby.

We’re now coming up to three months postpartum, and Alba has completed our little family. She is the most precious, happy baby. I can’t imagine life without her and I’m just so grateful that I don’t have to.

Finding my happy: accepting my past so that I could own my future

24th August 202124th August 2021by Lola Jimenez

Finding my happy: accepting my past so that I could own my future

I almost can’t believe that I am about to become someone’s mummy any minute now! My dreams have finally come true; I’m renting my perfect home, I’m pregnant with my perfect baby boy, and for the first time in my life I am completely at ease with myself. I have genuinely never felt so content in all my life.

It’s taken an absolute lifetime to get here though (my lifetime anyway!). I spent years seeking the approval of others, and feeling like I had to keep proving how worthy I was in familial, social, and intimate relationships. I believed that I couldn’t have any of the things I wanted until someone else believed I should or some else wanted to give them to me. Don’t get me wrong I am a confident and outgoing person, and I’ve never come across as a wallflower, but people often mistake this vocal confidence in social scenarios for self-assurance or inflated self-esteem. The reality however, is that I have always found if you make just enough noise or put on a big enough performance then people think they know what they are getting with you and don’t try to dig any deeper. It’s amazing just how superficial many of the relationships we hold dear actually are when we think about who really knows us or cares enough to dig past the layer of bullshit we’re all capable of covering our shortfalls with. This overconfidence that I portrayed was merely a defence mechanism. It wasn’t deliberate either, more of a subconscious act, as I too thought that I was a strong and confident person who wouldn’t take any shit from anyone else. However it wasn’t until I got close to my thirties that I realised that being the life and soul of the party was a cover up, a band aid masking a much deeper emptiness inside. I always knew something was missing, I just never really understood what it was until then.

Let us not pretend that I went through my twenties having had a terrible time though. I had a great time. At least I had what I thought equated to a great time when I was in the moment. I partied my absolute pants off and I was always surrounded by people. I hated being alone and so I made it my mission to seek out friends who liked to socialise just like me. Often these friendships had very short life cycles (going back to what I was saying about how superficial some of our relationships can be) and sadly the ones that lasted longer were usually the ones where I had ‘saviour’ complex, wanting everyone to have the best time ever and feel great. I didn’t ever want anyone to feel depressed or lonely (because I knew first hand how that felt) and because others couldn’t always afford to go out, this usually resulted in me paying for all the drinks, dinners, and taxis we were enjoying back then. The people who stuck around the longest seemed to be gaining significantly from my cavalier generosity. As I said earlier, I partied pretty hard and so was always in debt. I knew I was making poor choices at the time but I always found a way to justify my actions to myself. I didn’t think I was hurting anyone but myself by getting into debt and drinking excessively, and because I also thought I was having a good time, I didn’t feel the need to stop. As far as I was concerned it was nobody else’s business. My rent was always paid and I never borrowed money from friends or family, so what harm was I really doing? What I should have realised is that the whole time I was filling the void with these stupid things, living this frivolous social life, I was loosing sight of the things I so desperately wanted: a family, children, a home of my very own. I wasn’t hurting anyone else, but I wasn’t helping myself much either.

I always knew that the minute I met the right man and marriage was on the cards that I would be able to drop that lifestyle like a hot potato. It wasn’t the real me. I was a respectable girl, a faithful catholic girl (albeit not a perfect one) who knew better and always planned to be better eventually. I was waiting for someone to come along and finally give me purpose, that stability and sense of family that I had been searching for, so that I could show the world who I really wanted to be. What I didn’t give much thought to though, is that the nice guys weren’t hanging around waiting for the girls who were partying hard enough to keep up with the boys to get their shit together. No, to think that was just silly. The nice guys were settling down with girls who had already started playing the part that I was waiting to audition for. So where did that leave me when it came to the dating game?

I can openly admit that I have the absolute worst taste in men. At least I did. I’d like to think I know better now given that I can recognise where I went wrong time and time again. First of all, I had been entering the selection process with a warped sense of judgement. Having grown up around strong men, both physically and in character, I’m drawn to these qualities in a partner. The problem is that I have often mistaken cockiness for confidence and aggression for strength. I was basically walking around picking complete dickheads because I thought they were ‘really manly’. I’m not a complete idiot though and they didn’t manage to reel me in with their narcissistic egos alone. Obviously they were very good at playing the game too. They put out just the right amounts of affection at the right times and made all the promises a girl like me wants to hear, all the while satisfying their own agendas and ensuring that I lost complete sense of mine. I’ve never been accused of dating men who were stupid. Assholes yes, morons no.

Another problem is that I am a bit all or nothing, so when I commit to a relationship, I am completely committed to it. In my defence, I also grew up listening to 90s r’n’b music where women were encouraged to be ‘ride or die’ and every other song was about a man wanting to make up for cheating by blowing your mind with amazing sorry sex. As an adult woman, and not an easily influenced teenager, I can now tell you that the ‘ride or die’ mentality is actually the biggest pile of bullshit to have ever come out of the 90s. The idea that a woman has to stand by a man regardless of what he does, putting up with all his shitty behaviour with unconditional loyalty is just a load of crap frankly. However this era did breed a whole bunch of young women who went into their first relationships (and often plenty more after) feeling as though they weren’t playing their part properly if they didn’t live up to this ideology. I didn’t know it at the time but I was heavily influenced by this. I was also a bit of a prude in my earlier life (yes I know you would never believe it the way I confidently talk about sex, vaginas and everything in between nowadays) and I was a reasonably pretty girl, so got a lot more male attention than I was comfortable with. I hid behind my relationships and felt safer when I had a partner. I was also always very committed to anyone I was intimate with, which meant that I stayed in bad relationships for much longer than I should have. I think that most people can appreciate that once you’re emotionally invested, it’s much harder to walk away from someone who is no good for you.

It might seem like it but this article was never meant to be about bashing the people of the past. It’s more about how I learnt to accept the role I myself played in it. There are many parts of my life that I had no control of (if you read my earlier blogs you might know what I’m referring to) but there have also been many parts that I can accept only happened because I allowed them to, or because I accepted that they were okay at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not responsible for the fact that some men are just shitty boyfriends, but I am responsible for letting them be my shitty boyfriends. When I accepted my role in these toxic scenarios and realised I had nothing to prove but everything to gain from discovering my own self-worth, instilling a higher level of self-preservation, everything shifted. When I took ownership of my own happiness and made choices with the actual purpose of making my own dreams come true, I finally discovered what it meant to be completely fulfilled. It takes a huge amount of self-awareness, and you have to be prepared to really do the work on yourself, but as I get closer and closer to my due date I can’t help but look at the little life that I’ve built and I’m overcome with an abundance of pure joy. Yes, I have found my happy, but the only reason I really am truly satisfied is because I built it for myself, not needing the approval or acceptance of anyone else, and so now I live without the fear that someone else can come and take it away from me. I built this kingdom, and I am its ruler. I finally feel completely free.

What I’m trying to say, and probably the purpose for me writing this piece, is that sometimes it can feel like you are so far from the person you want to be, and the life you want to be living, but it really is possible to turn it around. I spent years just accepting that I couldn’t change my fate and that some people just have better lives than others. I believed that not everyone was really meant to be truly happy. Finally owning the past did not only bring me a sense of peace, but it also helped me understand how to take charge of my future. If you’re that girl, or even that boy, living for the here and now because you can’t see a way past your current circumstances, then don’t be too hard on yourself. It is possible to find your happy too, you just have to work out what that happiness looks like. Once you’ve sussed that out, you’ll be able to take positive steps to building a future that fulfils you. Trust me, if I can do it, then you most certainly can do it too.

Proud to be an egg donor

1st July 202124th August 2021by Lola Jimenez

Proud to be an egg donor

When I first heard about egg sharing, a scheme run by a number of clinics across the UK allowing women who fit certain criteria to donate some of their eggs to another woman who cannot use her own, I thought it was a great idea. Women who successfully take part in the scheme as an egg donor are able to access heavily discounted, and sometimes free IVF in return for their donation, yet still there is a real shortage of donor eggs. I took part in the egg sharing scheme when undergoing my own fertility treatment, donating 11 eggs to another family who needed them. When people learn of this decision they always ask me how I feel about it with the expectation that it will have taken a really heavy emotional toll on me. In reality that just isn’t the case.

I always wanted to be a mother. That’s something I knew in my heart from a very young age. It felt, and still feels, like the most natural decision in the world to me. In deciding whether or not to donate my eggs I thought about how I might feel if I couldn’t have children of my own. I would feel like I had lost my purpose. That’s not to say anyone is without purpose if they can’t have children, but I have spent my entire life making decisions around the narrative of ‘when I start my family’ and ‘when I have children of my own’, and so that is genuinely how I think I would feel. Everything I have ever done has been building up to the moment that I finally get to become a mother. I then thought about how incredible it would be to give someone else the chance to fulfil their dreams to have children, or to give another family the chance to grow. At that point my mind was pretty much made up.

The absence of my own mother, and her failure to live up to the role, has made it easier for me than most to accept the differences between an emotional and a genetic connection. When people ask how I will feel about another family bringing up a child that is ‘half mine’ I really don’t see it that way at all. I have been quoted before using the cup of tea analogy: if you are making a cup of tea and you have to borrow some sugar from your neighbour to complete it, it doesn’t somehow become your neighbour’s cup of tea does it? I see myself as the friendly neighbour in this scenario, helping out with the missing ingredient that someone else needs to complete their family, in the same way that my chosen sperm donor has done so that I could become pregnant with my own baby boy.

When I received my positive pregnancy result, and then when I found out the donor family had also become pregnant with my donated eggs, the difference in my emotional response became very apparent. In discovering that I was pregnant and that my IVF had been successful I had an overwhelming feeling of complete gratitude. I was grateful that my little embryo had stuck and I genuinely couldn’t believe my luck. It all felt a bit too good to be true so I kept waiting for the penny to drop or for something to go wrong, but each day as I became more and more grateful (and more pregnant!) it all became more real. I suddenly began to accept that this amazing thing had ‘happened to me’. This was a huge contrast to finding out that the recipient family had also become pregnant. When I found out they had also managed to conceive, instead of that feeling of gratitude, I was absolutely overwhelmed with an intense sense of pride. This incredible thing hadn’t ‘happened to me’ this time. In fact I had ‘made it possible’ for someone else to experience this incredible joy that I had been so grateful to feel myself. I was proud to have been able to contribute to their success story, and I was so delighted that they too had been able to experience what I had felt just a few days before when receiving my positive test result. The contrast between my feelings towards both pregnancies is just incredibly different and I probably feel more connected to those two strangers, because I got to be a part of their journey, than I do to the child that will be born as a result of my genetic donation.

I suppose I’m writing this to try and encourage people to think about egg donation as a less scary consideration. On my own journey to become a mother I have been enormously supported by the fertility community online, connecting with some absolutely incredible women who are just as sure that they are meant to be mothers as I am. For some of these women, the only thing that holds them back is access to healthy donor eggs. Sadly the low number of egg donations means that the costs associated with using donor eggs are very high, and in parts of the UK the wait for donor eggs can be lengthy – I’ve heard of waiting lists of up to twenty-four months in Scotland!! So in summary, I think if you are able to donate eggs to another family then you should certainly give real thought to this as a choice, particularly if you are considering assisted fertility for yourself. Not only do many clinics run egg sharing schemes that reward egg donation with subsidised or free treatments (effectively helping you to make your own dreams come true!), but because the stigmas attached to the idea of ‘giving away your DNA’ are so far removed from the realities of what that actually means or feels like in practice – or at least they are for me!

I’m very conscious that I can only speak from my own personal experience, and that as a solo mum by choice I was able to make my decision without having to take into account the feelings of a partner or other external factors, but I hope that this post helps you to understand that egg donation doesn’t always have to be a weighty emotional sacrifice. Donating eggs (and sperm) is the most generous and worthy gift you could offer someone who is trying to grow their family, and it really could be the thing that you end up being the most proud of when you look back on your life.

Egg collection day – 23 eggs collected, 11 donated

For more information on egg sharing please see the link below:

https://www.hfea.gov.uk/donation/donors/egg-sharing/

Why I chose to become a solo mum

14th June 202115th June 2021by Lola Jimenez

Why I chose to become a solo mum

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a mother. My own mum wasn’t really cut out for the job when she had me and didn’t really deserve the title. She once left me behind in Sainsbury’s after getting caught shoplifting. I was three. She literally left me there standing in the crisp aisle while she made a run for it. I recall sitting in a room at the local police station having been taken there by officers who thought I was just a lost child. I suppose in a way I was, except for the fact that my mum knew exactly where she’d bloody left me! A female officer went through a selection of stranger danger flash cards and subsequently mum was arrested so they managed to figure out who I was. My Dad was called to collect me but the rest of that day is a bit of a blur. Again at the same age I remember being allowed to play with the kids in the street outside our flat, completely unsupervised. My mum was quite cross with me one evening because I’d lost my hair scrunchie so she sent me outside to look for it. It was quite late, and I only know this because of how dark it was and that the other kids had all gone indoors. I don’t remember being scared, but I do remember not wanting to be out there on my own so I just stood under the street light overlooking the patch of grass in front of our flat and waiting to be called back in. You’d think it would be impossible to remember so far back, but the mind really does have a funny way of holding on to all the best bits! I’ve got countless memories like these, each as horrifying as the next, but this story isn’t really supposed to be about my childhood and I’m definitely not looking for a pity party here.

Anyway, when I was five, as a result of my mum’s terrible parenting (if parenting is actually what we’re actually going to call it) I eventually went to live with my Dad. I know what you’re thinking, and I’ve often thought the same. How on earth did the woman who abandoned me with the savoury snacks get to take me home again? How is it that she got to keep hold of me for two more whole years? I really can’t quite fathom how that was ever allowed, but somehow it was. It was the early nineties and it really was a different time. I’m thirty-three now and the fact that I ever went to live with my Dad at all is a testament to his complete dedication to the cause; they really never used to let little girls go to live with single Dad’s back then.

Fortunately my Dad had a very close family at the time, and so with lots of support and after a very difficult custody battle he was victorious, saving me from what I imagine would have been a very troubled life. His mother, my Nan, was amazing. She was the matriarch of all matriarchs, the centre of our family, and she was everything I aspire to be as a mother. All of my family values come from her. Without my Nan’s love, warmth, and the occasional slap around the back of the head, I would not be the woman I am today (and I think I turned out alright if I say so myself!). It’s safe to say she was the only real mother figure I have ever known.

My Dad then went on to meet someone and we lived together with her and her son, and shortly after they had my two sisters together (half sisters if you’re picky, but to me they’re just my sisters). I was never her child though and she made sure that I knew it, making me feel unwanted and unwelcome in what was supposed to be my new family. Unbeknown to my Dad, his girlfriend was a bully at the hands of whom I experienced unforgivable mental and physical abuse. I left home at sixteen, finding the first possible excuse to get away from her. There’s quite a bit more to that story but again that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that my experience of supposedly ‘mother’ figures has been pretty shitty thus far; because let’s face it, my Nan was actually not fulfilling the role of a mother for me, but was in fact just an exceptional grandparent. I think this lack of a mother-daughter relationship has always made me more determined to have a family of my own, to create that sense of stability and belonging that I’ve never really had and often at times looked for in the wrong places. I didn’t have the ‘and that’s when I knew I wanted to be a mother’ moment that many women speak about. For me it was just something that I instinctively knew I was always supposed to be. A wrong that I was supposed to make right perhaps? In fact, the idea of not being a parent isn’t something I have ever really considered. If IVF didn’t work for me I would absolutely have gone down the adoption route.

So why become a solo mum by choice? That’s the reason we’re all really here isn’t it? If I’m completely honest, I always thought I’d have my children by now and actually always had it in my head that I wanted to be married first. Sadly, despite my very traditional view on what my family should look like, I’ve often made very poor choices when it comes to men. In November 2019 I left a six year relationship (the reasons for this being personal and not important in giving context here) but it was immediately following this break-up that I decided to take steps to become a solo mum. I realised I’d wasted all my good boob years with the wrong man thinking we were going to have marriage, babies, and the whole shebang! I was left with the gut wrenching fear that if that happened again with the next guy I met then I could be left unmarried and childless all over again, only next time I would be much closer to turning forty. Now let me be very clear. I don’t for a second think that there is any requirement to have children before the age of forty and I believe that every woman has the right to make her own choices. I mean, that is literally what this blog exists to promote! For me however, I decided that if I was going to get to my forties and potentially have to make a baby on my own anyway, then I might as well do it now instead while I still have energy and patience, and while my body might still give me a fighting chance!

So ultimately, I decided that I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a wife. I was happy to put a pause on finding the man of my dreams but I wasn’t prepared to wait any longer to have a child. I’ve always been very independent and self-reliant (I’ve had to be) and so I wasn’t going to let my relationship status determine whether or not I get to be a mother. I just wasn’t going to let my chance to build a family of my own disappear because the right man had not yet presented himself.

So that was that. Decision made. I bet on myself and it was to date the best gamble I’ve ever taken. With the help of some incredible medical professionals and the support of the people I love the most, here I am seven months pregnant with my first child. I’m due to give birth to my son in early September and I couldn’t be more excited. Suddenly that longing for acceptance and belonging has completely disappeared. Nothing is remotely as important to me as what’s coming next. For the first time ever I am going to be somebody’s everything, and he is going to be mine.