And now I wasn’t.
I was pregnant.
I couldn’t go back to that, back to feeling the way that I did.
I couldn’t let that happen.
I couldn’t let this baby happen.
To be the best mother I could be for my four boys, I couldn’t have this baby.
I couldn’t tell Liam, either. He’d talk me round. He’d have me bare foot and pregnant until I hit menopause if he could, and that was not what I wanted.
Maybe in a few years I would feel different, but at that moment in my life, I couldn’t do this.
So, I took the test.
I made the calls.
I booked the appointment.
I arranged a baby sitter.
Then, on a sunny September morning, I took myself to a private clinic and did what I thought was the right thing for my family and myself.
2016
The guilt.
The guilt.
The fucking guilt.
It was killing me.
I couldn’t look my husband in the face.
I couldn’t hold my children.
It clawed its way from my insides out. It wrapped around me. Choking. Smothering. Suffocating. I hid in the fog to escape, but even there, it found me. It was the ultimate predator, and I was its prey.
The old me was gone. Lost. Consumed.
When I looked at myself in the mirror, I looked the same. On the outside, I was the same, but inside, I was gone. I was nowhere to be found. I searched and I searched, but she was just not there. I hated that she was gone. I hated the person that was left behind, and I hated that convincing the world that nothing had changed made me so fucking tired. So tired that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had nothing left inside me. Nothing left to give.
But I lied. I smiled and I lied.
I was fine.
I was fine.
I had done a terrible thing, and I would never be fine again.
***
Christmas and New Year went by in a blur, and I sank deeper into the fog—the thickest, darkest, densest fog yet. I smiled and cooked and cleaned. I wrapped presents and put up a tree all by myself because I got sick of waiting for Liam to help me. In fact, I put the tree up five fucking times in total. Between Flynn trying to climb it, Lucas pulling the decorations from it, and the three eldest boys colliding with it during their ultimate play fight tournaments, it was knocked over four times.
It happened though. Christmas. I knew it did because my brother thought it would be a good idea to buy my kids a dog. A fucking dog. As if I didn’t have enough chaos and shit to clean up, he added a puppy for me to deal with.
Rogue.
That was his name. No clue why, but that was his name. He was small and brown, chewed everything, and shit all over my fucking house.
Kind of cute, though, and the boys loved him, so that was all that really mattered, right? The boys loved him.
They boys got a dog, and Liam got me a babysitter. Well, not me—he got a babysitter to watch the kids for me when I needed it. Her name is Taylor, and she had way too much energy. She was bright, she was bubbly. The boys loved her. Having a babysitter meant that Liam and me could have nights out. We could go on dates again. Except, Liam was never home. Never fucking here. Working, working, always fucking working.
Turned out dogs and babysitters were a lethal combination when I was thrown into the mix.
It was the second day of term after the Christmas break. And the day started as shit from the get go. I’d booked Taylor to babysit while I went on another search to find the old me, but I had overslept. I did that occasionally, but today was a school day and the bone-weary tiredness I was constantly fighting had got the better of me.
I ran downstairs as fast as I could and found Carter at the kitchen worktop eating cereal. The bowl he was eating from was almost empty, but there was a pool of milk with Cheerio’s floating in it, over the table, on the floor, every-fucking-where.
The cereal box was on the floor too, the contents spilled out, and the dog was eating them. I cleared this mess up first. Then I ventured into the family room. We had a no food rule in this room for the kids, but obviously, I wasn’t there to enforce it, so Lucas was eating jam straight from the jar. At least he was using a spoon.
Every single cushion and throw pillow had been pulled from the sofa and scattered around the room, and Archie and Flynn were in the middle of one of their usual tournaments in the middle of it. Their faces smeared red and orange.
I took the jam jar from Lucas, and groaned when I saw he was naked from the waist down. We were almost at the end of potty training, but he was still wearing a nappy for bed.
“Boys, what did you have for breakfast? Pick up the cushions please. Where did the baby’s nappy go?
“We had Wotsits and sauce,” Archie informed me.