From Miscarriages to Cambodia — An Unlikely Turn of Events

Giving up on my dream of becoming a mother was a chance to find a greater purpose in the world

Some time ago, I published a poem about the pain of miscarrying.

You can read it here.

This wasn’t the only miscarriage I had. In fact, I had a series of them and the pain of never managing to carry a baby to term became more intense as time went on.

Finally, I confided to my husband that I couldn’t take any more loss. He shared that he too was struggling to bear it. Seeing me go through the physical pain with each loss and being unable to bear any of that pain for me made him feel guilt, while also having his hopes dashed at bringing a baby into the world.

It ended up being one of the most difficult conversations we had ever had. I told him that I wanted to accept that becoming a mother wasn’t in the cards for me, but that also meant that he would have to accept not becoming a father.

A part of me was prepared for him to lose his desire to be with me. Giving up life plans like that does not come without major pain and emptiness and I didn’t want to hold him to a life of childlessness, should that be something he felt he couldn’t live without.

He confessed that it was excruciating for him to imagine a life different to the one we had planned — the one in which we would lead a simple life, raising at least three children.

Going through the stages of young parenthood, getting to enjoy activities together as they grew older, and having them as companions for the rest of our lives.

Thankfully, we were offered free counselling by the health service, to help us deal with our loss. Although it was only offered to me, I insisted that he had to come with me.

That counsellor had no idea what she would be dealing with. For the most part, she helped women to feel positive about taking new steps towards conceiving again while encouraging them to go through many medical tests to try to understand what may be preventing them carrying a baby to term.

With us, it became a whole different package. I told her that we didn’t want to discuss preparing ourselves emotionally to try again to become pregnant but that we wanted to explore how to navigate a life together without children, if that was even possible.

She could have told us to go away and seek private couples counselling but she didn’t. I thought she might reject us when she knew that we didn’t want to try again but instead, she embraced the opportunity to help two people who were on the verge of falling apart completely, due to my decision to create a life without children.

That counsellor is someone I will be grateful to for the rest of my life.

She didn’t try to influence but she helped us to find hope beyond what we had thought would be our destiny.

Both in our early thirties, we were young enough to go, travel, and do something different and meaningful as an interruption to our careers, and still return to build a life at home in England when we chose to. We were both teachers and knew that there would never be a lack of jobs for us later on, when we chose to return.

We had been building savings, ready for our life ahead with children, and they now could be our security for a nomadic life. We had a house that we owned outright and could rent out to help pay our way while we travelled. To be quite honest, we had it good, despite our desperate disappointments.

Once we realised just how fortunate we were compared with the other early-thirties couples who were already tied down by young children, our mindsets completely changed.

But, at this point, we still had no idea what we were going to do going forward, so we started to feel out possibilities and put the word out to friends and family that we were open to opportunities to volunteer in places across the world.

What happened over the next few years was completely life-changing.

Our first port of call was Battambang in Cambodia, where we were put in touch with an English man who had married a Cambodian woman. She was the most wonderful artist and he had a great mind for both business and philanthropy.

Together they had set up an arts centre which raised money to fund young Cambodian artists to study. In addition, there was a fund that helped the poorest members of the city, especially disadvantaged children whose families couldn’t afford to give them an education.

While I didn’t feel that anything we did while we were there was of huge impact, being able to offer support, work in the arts centre and thus extend its opening hours, and get to visit some of the children who benefitted from donations all made us feel that even the tiny bit that we did made a difference.

It was while we were in Battambang that we learnt about an organisation that worked in various regions across the world, Heifer International.

As well as doing relief work, they offered loans to families in the form of an animal — either a goat or a cow — which gave milk and could give the family an opportunity to make an income.

Now, I wouldn’t normally condone the offering of loans to people with next to nothing to their names but this was different. The loan could be paid back in the form of money but it could also be paid forward in the form of gifting the cow or goat’s offspring to another local family in need.

And, really, the idea that it was a loan was to help the families to understand how business works and to be able to make effective business plans, even if that only meant creating a timeline for impregnating a cow, projected milk production, and how and where they would sell the milk.

We applied to go and work with the organisation in Laos and were accepted. This turned into an incredible six months of living with local families and learning what life was really like living as simply as people do outside of our developed, Western culture.

However, while I thought that this experience was about me giving to others, I quickly realised that I was gaining much more from this experience than I was probably giving.

The most impactful moment for me during this six months spent in Laos was when I began to tell people the story of why we were childless. At the time, it was still very hard to talk about, especially when surrounded by so many women and children.

But, as I spoke up, I discovered just how common miscarrying was among women. Somehow, it is such a hushed subject in the west that we are led to believe that there is something wrong with us when we miscarry, yet for these women it was part of everyday life.

Not only that but many of these women had lost children they had carried to term and birthed. To lose a baby in the first month or so of their life was surprisingly common.

Learning such things diminished the scale of my own pain and I began to feel truly understood for the first time. There was a certain kinship that women developed over the loss of babies and, for the first time, I was part of something, not excluded due to my childlessness.

Our travels then took us onto other places and plans. I got my Yoga Teaching Certificate in northern India and began leading retreats of my own in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, my husband wrote for a travel magazine and spent a lot of time drawing, his greatest passion.

We were happy but we still felt like we were filling a gap. A real purpose eluded us.

It was coming back to work with Heifer International when disaster struck, that we were reminded that our nomadic freedom had a purpose in itself.

In April 2015, a massive earthquake hit Kathmandu and ripped through the Kathmandu valley. The area was devastated and Heifer International immediately moved their operations there. They put the word out to all previous volunteers to request human aid and we decided that we would go straight there to offer whatever help we could.

This was the moment I realised that my life is not only about fulfilling my own dreams but of being able to do something that really makes a difference in the lives of others.

What we saw during the year that followed was something that few ever get to see in their lifetime. Much of our time was spent in the Kathmandu valley, living and working with local people who had less than nothing following this devastating earthquake.

Less than nothing.

Family members were lost. Mothers, children, aunts, uncles and grandparents. No one got away without losing someone significant in their lives.

The walls of their homes crumbled and even the foundations cracked beneath their feet.

They lost livestock and crops they had invested time, energy, and money in.

And then there was the trauma of experiencing such an event. The effects of which they may never heal from.

They had lost far more than they had to begin with.

And it made my losses so small in comparison.

The year spent in the Kathmandu valley was the year that solidified my and my husband’s shared vision and, thus, our relationship. We knew that we had so much more that we could do for the planet and its inhabitants, and it gave us purpose.

I wouldn’t say that life has been smooth-sailing ever since but we continued to travel and live in different cultures, giving back when and where we could. The pandemic made us reassess and brought us back to England to start a whole new adventure back home. What that will bring, we wait and see.

Thank you to Alicia Domínguez for inspiring me to share this story. Here is the story she wrote that really got the cogs turning on this: