This is a post for my paid community, and a taster is offered for free subscribers. I’ve seen lots of criticism of this recently, and want to begin by saying I’m sorry if this feels annoying/ unfair. My reason for doing this is that I personally subscribe to substacks based on having had a taster read, so I imagine others appreciate too. I so much appreciate all of you here, and as usual if you can’t afford a subscription but would appreciate one, reach out. I’ve been losing a huge amount of paid followers on here, and a huge part of me wonders if the substack payment method really works at all to be honest. Even at such a small outgoing per month for, say, this substack, there are so many other amazing writers that deserve to be followed too, and for most people experiencing this cost of living chaos, paying for multiple ongoing subscriptions is not possible. So, really, if cost is a barrier, and you like what I write, reach out. X
Tenderness warning: fertility struggles/ maternal grief.
With love, always x
It began with a single pale pink poppy, my path into (m)otherhood.
I was not yet thirty, single and full of grief.
It was in a small coastal town outside Edinburgh, and it was not yet summer; the earth’s daughter only recently returned to her, back up from the darkness.
I was walking with a friend who was about to end her marriage, and she was asking me what I would do in her situation.
She explained that all she had ever wanted was to get married and make babies. To make a home, fill it with art & Shirley Hughes books, bake sweet potatoes in the oven, sow seeds in the garden & fill her hallway with muddy wellies & scooters.
She’d done all that, but it didn’t feel like what she’d imagined it would. She loved her wee ones so much but she didn’t love her husband, maybe loved someone else instead, and had no idea where she belonged in it all.
She stopped, right outside a beautiful abandoned, derelict townhouse — all North Sea beauty & almost summer tenderness—and she said something that I am confident changed my life.
She said : “I am so sorry to be bringing this up, given you’ll never have to worry about any of this stuff.”
That friend did have a sense, a little, of the journey I’d been on for the decade before that almost summers day. The diagnosis , at 21, of
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