My mother passed away three weeks ago after a sudden diagnosis of cancer and I am spiralling. My whole life and sense of self is falling apart.
I am an only child from a small family - Mum, Dad and a cousin. We spend all family holidays together and are ridiculously close. My mother made a huge fuss of holidays and treated me and my cousin like big children, even though we are 39 (me) and 52 respectively.
I’ve had a partner for 15 years and we live together. We agreed to be child free many years back and have been living happily focusing on work, friends and travel. My cousin is single and has no children.
Mum’s illness was sudden and traumatic - she collapsed one day and we discovered she had cancer that had metastasised. She never returned to her normal self and we slowly watched her pass - a traumatic experience. She was 77 but incredibly active and vital, even up to the day before she collapsed.
Earlier in the year, I decided I was no longer happy being child free. I came off my birth control and planned to get fertility tested so I could raise the question with my partner (42). But then Mum got sick.
Now I am positively writhing with regret at my earlier certainty that I didn’t want children. I thought so long and hard about the decision and was sure I wouldn’t regret a thing; but now that feels so stupid. I love being part of a family and want to pass our traditions on. Why did it take me so long to work this out? Why did it take my mother’s death?
I have slept for barely two hours a night since she died. One night I blurted all of this out to my partner in an insensitive way. He started talking about leaving me, saying he would like to start again and would have had children once, with someone else, but not me. I was so horrified I had to tell him it was mad grief talking, not my real self.
I spend the days and nights frantically googling the success rates of IVF at my age, and last week booked a test which I went to secretly. I am only waiting for my mother’s funeral to be over before I begin the process, as my fertility is perilous at this age.
I feel I am going quite insane and behaving in ways that are self destructive and cruel. At the same time, I feel her death has revealed things I need to act on, and shown up horrible tensions in my relationship with my partner. Behind all this is the terrible loss of my mother - a brilliant and loving woman who I feel I let down immensely by not making her a grandmother and my not knowing my own mind enough to seek out a better relationship and to have children that I think I truly wanted all along.
I don’t know what to do and feel my support network has collapsed as I am taking care of my Dad in their house. He is drinking too much, and wracked with grief and anxiety. I think he will drink himself to death if I leave him. I have gone from a sweet little family to lonely chaos in two months, and it feels like a large part of it is my fault.