Karen Humphries

Hauntingly, the strewn pages are staring up at me. There is a mess in front of me, below in between my legs. The pages are looking back at me like a gun pointed at my head, there is nowhere to hide. I am fully exposed…I am a bystander. I am being a witness to the funeral of my life, a memorial held for parts of my lost hopes and all the desires of being a mother. That life ripped from me like a fierce tornado uncaring when it takes as a prisoner. The dreams, the ones that life did not get to play out.

As this special service continues my psychologist is opposite me, sitting with me on this journey, enveloping me within the ‘therapeutic womb’, a place of safety that has been built up over time. Tenderly, my shaking hands take more pieces of paper which I had prepared earlier, each one is filled with a kaleidoscopic display of pictures that are a part of my life’s journey. Individual passages that I had been sharing with my psychologist over this time today, in which I had and was lovingly telling the story of each picture…each photo honouring the gentleness and importance of my voyage thus so far.

The pages hold the generational linage that I will never provide to mine or my husband’s family, something that others can do in their stride and that others take for granted and ever so effortlessly, or so it seems to appear. The space that I now sit in, is the space I have found myself being childless not by choice after years of multiple health and disability issues. Hesitation hits me, and a deep sigh is released. I don’t know where to start, even though I am halfway through…how do I just tear my lifelong dreams up?

Whimpering, I find myself having desperate thoughts…is this even comprehensible? How on earth do I do this? How do I let go of dreams, a lifetime of dreams? How do I make sense out of the heart wrenching pain I feel inside? My heart in utter desperation and my mind is at its wits end. I need the room to have the same resonance as a cathedral, corpulent and broad, so the hums of my innermost tribulations can travel far and wide. Allowing my prayers of desperation for courage, for mercy, for help, to be heard. My shame, the guilt, and other emotions are encapsulated in each action, in each photograph, in each moment that I explore. I let go of the dreams…oh the hurt and the grief. The tears seep from my eyes, down my grief wrenched face. My thoughts and emotions are like a spinning and uncontrolled whirlwind. I have never sat in a place like this before…nor would I want too ever again!

An audacious part of me packs a punch that radiates throughout my body, it provides the strength that I need to continue to tear these photographs up into pieces. My psychologist’s bowing head meets my reflection, I take in the deep respect he is giving this moment as he looks down at the floor. I have to do to this…and I have to start to move on.

Fresh dreams float into my mind…the aspirations that I have thought of and that I ploughed into the fields of my mind and scattered around the carpet at times, from the ritual of laying my goals for the future ahead of me with every new term whilst studying. My psyche contemplates the vision of graduating with a post-graduate counselling degree, a masters, even a PhD. Becoming the writer, I have dreamed of since I was a child…I would be helping others, just like me; letting others know that they are not travelling on this journey alone. Dreams that will succour me to leave some kind of legacy on this earth. Aspirations that would somehow allow me to be a mother to the world, acts that hold much bravery that will stay on this earth to help others, for ever more.

The grief within me still needs to speak, the pieces before me still need time. They are roaring, screaming, and beckoning out to me. My hands have a mind of their own and I pick some of the pieces which contain the images, that part of me wants…I am desperately wanting to hold to the old dreams…the parts of me still wailing inside. Something magically washes over me and I am given a new lease of vigour. It gives me the consent to let them fall once more knowing I could no longer hold on to these dreams. My psychologist beckons me to leave the room, and acknowledgement that he will pick the pieces.

The crisp air meets my face as I walk out into the day, reluctantly, I find my fingers press the play button so I can play the song once again. The beat matches my gait, tuned in like a marching band, as I walk across a bridge. In that moment, a school of teenagers engulf me, they are the ages that my children could have been. My unborn children’s voices in heaven sing to me saying: “mum we will meet one day, it wasn’t meant to be in this lifetime; keep on walking mum, go live and make those dreams come alive”. My chest expels powerfully, as I take a breath in and keep walking knowing I cannot look back. My mind must not look backwards.

Like the light that penetrates on to a tree’s leaves on a sunny day, this new beginning provides the nutrients to allow a person to thrive given the right nurturing. It gives me hope for how society might see myself and others who live with a variety of life’s challenges. Or that my voice might carry far and wide to change taboos and perceptions on certain subjects. Opening society’s blinkers to see my fellow women who are childless not by choice as well as other rare and minority groups finding themselves in…that they are still important, that we matter and that we are worthy.

I want others to see the mountains we have climbed to be still standing…I want to be seen and others to be seen more than just ‘barren women’, because every person in the world is fruitful. We are however just unique and that is okay.