I love my life – now I have made peace with not having a baby

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.

But that meant overcoming what she calls the “don’t give up” narrative.

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.

Nearly one in five women in the UK do not have children.

That can be for a variety of reasons, including personal choice. But some simply find that the family life they had imagined, does not happen.

After a year of failing to conceive Caroline and Gareth went to see the GP. A round of IVF in the UK was followed by more rounds abroad – a process of anxious appointments, medications and injections.

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.

“I started to not really like how I was feeling towards other people,” she says.

Friends would tell her not to worry, it would happen in the end, or that she should stop trying, because then she would fall pregnant.

Then in November six years ago, out of the blue, her friends were proved right. Not trying seemed to have worked.

She and Gareth had been living in a big farmhouse, in Rutland. They had just moved to a small cottage in a village, a kind of acceptance on some level that the large family they had been dreaming of was not going to be.

As the festive season approached they began to share the good news with friends and family.

Then on Christmas morning Gareth went out to deal with the dairy herd. By the time he was back she had lost the baby.

“It was the timing, the way it happened. It just felt so cruel.”

Her memories of that day are hazy.

But both of them feel that it was the turning point.

“It felt like we both knew it was time to begin to try to let go,” she says, but that in itself required a huge effort.

“I didn’t know at the point whether I was right. But we just began to tread forward,” she says.

She threw herself into work. She had started her business, selling biscuits stamped with personalised messages, during their second round of IVF.

At first if people said her business was her baby, she would bristle. These days she finds it comforting. After all, it is something she has nurtured for a decade.

She now has a team of 14 in the bakery, sends her biscuits all over the country, and has partnered with a mail order flower firm.

For Gareth letting go has meant rethinking his work altogether. He is about to start a new job as a greenkeeper at his golf club.

People do ask her if she considered adopting, but she says it “wasn’t the path that we chose.”

“Adoption isn’t just another way to become a parent. It’s a major decision.

A decade of IVF had changed Caroline’s relationship with her own body.

“I was focusing on this one thing it couldn’t do,” she says.

She started long distance running and instead of berating her body over its failure, she started celebrating what it could do instead. She has now done four half and full marathons, while Gareth is on his sixth.

“I love the life I’ve got.

“I don’t feel that direct sense of loss any more. It’s a different, a softer kind of sadness now.”

She has found a greater sense of peace as time passes. Even that comes though with pangs of guilt, wondering whether coming to terms with her childlessness, means she did not want it enough, or try hard enough.

She knows that’s still the “don’t give up” message, nagging at her conscience.

“We’re taught growing up that effort equals results, but it’s often not how it works.

“Life can still have meaning and it can still have purpose, even when it looks so drastically different from what you expected.”

If you, or someone you know, have been affected by pregnancy issues, please visit BBC Action Line to find information on organisations that can help.

All episodes of Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett are available on BBC Sounds. New episodes drop every Friday.