I’m moving away from him and over into the outer reaches where this car and the road and the mist are unimportant, and perhaps don’t really exist.

She was luminous with a bliss that wiped out the exhaustion and physical demands of a difficult birth and a baby who struggled to feed.

But I don’t say any of that because a mother can’t say these things.

‘Do you mind either way?’ The woman behind the till has scanned my box of Colgate and bottle of nit shampoo, but her hand pauses over the pregnancy test. My eyes flick quickly up to hers. I have four children already; asking me if I mind, as I buy a test that will seal my fate, feels way too intimate. What if I had been a different person, in diffe

he portioned out his love as equally as it’s possible to do when toddlers battled for attention, bombing us like screeching seagulls, while Jimmy and Dolly swooped ahead.

I could not look forward to the moment that might have been, the baby that might have been, but instead felt touched by an entirely new sort of loneliness, which pinched me when I wasn’t looking. But I had Jimmy, so I blinked at him, and smiled when I opened my eyes as he patted his palms on my face, squeezing my grief back into myself and squashin

The supine days of late pregnancy that I dreamed of vanish like a mirage, evaporating in the summer heat

am separated from another woman, my friend, because I cannot talk about this part of motherhood: the wanting and then the getting and the resenting and the missing, the longing.

Dash and Evangeline swarm from the house towards me across the lawn, pinning themselves against me as they clamour for me to hold their faces close to mine and to listen to the all-important news of what they had for lunch and their latest scrapes and grazes.