Positive Health Online

I am nothing if not an enigma and a seeming contradiction: I am infertile, but I have been pregnant; I have been pregnant but I have never given birth; I have never given birth yet I am the parent of Amy, my nineteen year old daughter.

And whilst on the face of it, this statement seems to be full of impossibilities, it is completely feasible when it’s broken down into its component parts. I have experienced the condition of infertility from my late 20s onwards, but I got pregnant when I had given up all hope after about five years of disappointments.

I then miscarried my child (the only one I was ever to conceive) before I went on to adopt a daughter from China in 1999, who was fourteen months old at the date of the adoption. Like many women, I had always presumed that I would have children, once I had established my career and the fact that I was unable to was a very bitter pill to swallow indeed - so there were a number of feelings which I had to work through before I felt ready even to consider adoption.

As well as the most obvious response of grief over the loss of my son, there was also the issue of facing up to the huge and more undefined loss of the finality of the concept of “never,” which was both definite and terrifying.

This part of my loss also gave rise to a number of complex thoughts and feelings: these included issues over my femininity (did failure to have a child mean that I wasn’t a real woman), over my temerity (in presuming that I would simply be able to have a child at the exact time when I was ready for one) and even over my own immortality (that strong urge to leave a ‘thumb print’ behind on the world before it’s too late).

Personally, I found it extremely hard to stand by as other people started and finished families while I was still left at the starting line, although I felt like I had already run the race several times over. I refused to go to certain shops at certain times because they were full of families and seeing them together just hurt too much, but I was always careful not to resent the good fortune of others because some instinct warned me to be wary of this as it would place me in danger of becoming too embittered to be able to move forward at all.

In fact, two of my nephews were born after my miscarriage and I was deeply conscious of the fact that although it wasn’t my fault that I remained childless, it also wasn’t the fault of my younger brother or of either of the children. And I don’t love either nephew any less than I love the three who were born pre-miscarriage.

In the end, what saved me was the assistance of good quality psycho-therapy, which allowed me to explore my feelings in depth, without feeling that I was burdening anyone else. After a few of these sessions, during which I described my fears over ending up childless, I said that I thought adoption was ‘cheating’, because it would get me to the place I wanted to be, without any more suffering or anguish. When challenged over my statement I was forced to admit that it didn’t make much sense.

My ex-husband and I then began to consider the options available to us, which included both domestic and overseas adoption.

We were influenced by the effects of the one-child policy in China in the 1990s on girls. We also wanted to adopt a baby as we had never been parents ourselves, so we wanted to develop as parents as our daughter developed, which would almost certainly not have been the case if we had gone for UK domestic adoption.

The whole process from initially contacting our local authority until journeying to China to meet our daughter took twenty months in total, dealing with both the authorities in the UK and in China.

It felt as though we were never going to get there at times during the waiting process. Then one day, we suddenly received the details of a tiny child, Tong Fang, who was half a world away. Then everything just started to happen in fast forward: we had to obtain visas, sort out travel arrangements, buy baby things and set off to find her, all within a few short weeks.

I have to admit that when we left home to travel to China, I was filled with trepidation, as there was so much at stake, especially the welfare of our future daughter.

I worried about whether Tong Fang (later to be given the English name Amy, whilst retaining her Chinese names as middle ones) would bond with us and about whether she would be healthy. Curiously, one thing I never worried about was whether Amy would feel like ‘mine’ (something the childless often wonder about when contemplating adoption). And, in fact, she has always felt like she belonged to me from day one.

We had to go through a period where Amy had to learn to trust me, especially as she had been unused to being talked to (she would put her hands over her ears) or to being touched (she would nuzzle her own arms for comfort).

It was also apparent that she had been given a very limited variety of food and nothing that had to be chewed; I ended up liquidizing her food and I treated her diet as a scientific experiment, as I was afraid that she would never overcome the deficiencies of her previous lack of nourishment if I didn’t work out a varied and balanced menu for her each day.

Although this now sounds rather daunting, in reality, it wasn’t at all as I just went with my instincts for most of our early development together, as mother and daughter - just like any new mother does.

Looking back down the years on that time now, I really do wish I’d known during the long months of waiting and worrying what I know now – that Amy Tong Fang was to bring a great deal of joy into my life and that, eighteen years later, I simply couldn’t imagine my life without her.