GOING TO THE edge

Sarah Wilson’s new book is a manifesto for living one wild and precious life. Here, she opens up about miscarriage in her mid-forties, and the power of being pushed to the brink

It’s been a bumpy and unconventional journey, this pregnancy business. In my mid-thirties, various specialists told me I’d never be able to have kids. I was going through premature menopause, they said, a side effect of my Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid. But then I managed to reverse all the antibody markers over 10 years of work on my health and got pregnant in an eleventh-hour anomaly at 42 with a man I’d loved. Then I miscarried. Then we split.

I ached to have a child. Through two decades of friends having their first then second kids and sharing their joy and fatigue. Through relationships with men who liked the idea of a woman who wasn’t gunning for kids, then one day, a few months in, not liking the idea of a “barren woman”.

This ache is particular. It’s love that longs to give unconditionally but is denied its object of outpouring, so it expands and expands and sings out into the vast vacuum of the night. And you can do all the self-love work and crystal healing or whatever you like, but that aching love only ever gets bigger.

So of course, having fallen pregnant once, I felt I had to respond to the weirdness of the opportunity and give it another go.

But then I couldn’t find sperm. It’s not such an easy thing to come across, despite this sense my coupled friends have that it pours down streets. Most of my male friends are married or felt they were now too old to take on fatherhood, even if it was in an all-care, no-responsibility kind of way. Plus, Australian laws surrounding sperm donation are some of the most prohibitive in the world, making it nigh impossible for a single woman over 42, as it turns out, to buy it from randoms.