LOUISE THOMPSON: I’ll never have the ‘perfect family’ I dreamed of… I’ll never be able to go back and fix what happened to me during childbirth

Do you have a triggering date in your life? For me it was always Valentine’s Day, the date two of my most serious relationships ended. Every year, on 14 February, I couldn’t stop crying.

My loathing of V Day paled into insignificance, though, when I was faced with an experience that hit me with a deeper kind of grief. The anniversary of a traumatic event can cause visceral reactions – fellow members of the unlucky PTSD club will be familiar – and now the ultimate test is my son’s birthday: 15 November.

It’s a day that should be filled with pure love, but instead it’s fraught with so many complex emotions. Last Friday, Leo turned three – but it was also three years since I nearly lost my life bringing him into the world.

The first year, I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I had a child. He was having a birthday. All the other people I knew threw parties for their children so I should do the same. It took loads of planning and some panic, but we made it happen. Apparently, I didn’t seem that normal, but I had a few moments of joy and I thought I was doing a good job of pretending to be happy.

We call year one denial.

The second year I wanted it to be low-key and comfortable, so we had a small family-only gathering at home. I cooked a laughably bad hedgehog cake. There were chunks of butter in it that I tried to pass off as white chocolate. We even managed to go ice-skating at Battersea Power Station. I got through it but was one step away from having a panic attack most of the day.

We call year two survival.

This year, though, was different. I actually felt excited by the idea of doing something lovely for my son. Not just because I ‘should’ but because I wanted to. I’ve created some mental space around the anniversary, and I was able to embrace my emotions rather than hide them. My partner Ryan and I planned a weekend in Somerset, bringing all the sides of our family together for a knees-up.

We call year three level-headedness. Or reality. Or maybe even, dare I say it, happiness.

But as the third year approached, I could feel something bigger than a party looming over me: the fact that I will never have the ‘perfect family’ I always thought I would.

Nothing emphasises the passing of time like your child’s birthday, and I can’t deny that when I look around at other friends popping out countless children, it hits home that this is not a reality for us. I always imagined I’d have four children.

I loved the idea of a big family with lots of noise and different personalities. People said it would be hard work, but I liked the idea of each sibling bringing up the one behind them. I wanted to be like the Von Trapps. This will never be my life.

I used to believe that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything, but that’s not true: I will never be able to go back and fix what happened to me. There will always be a sadness that I won’t experience childbirth again. That sadness is a part of who I am now and I need to learn how to take it forward into the rest of my life.

There are parts of me that are unfixable (I say that literally as well as metaphorically because I have sat opposite a doctor from Womb Transplant UK as they told me I was not a candidate). People have said that no medic would come near me if I tried to have another baby. Even the NHS hospital I gave birth in said that they wouldn’t be willing to perform another hysteroscopy (a surgical procedure to examine the womb) because it would pose a threat to my life.

While I try to accept the facts, I can’t help comparing my family to the one I grew up in – my younger brother Sam and I with an age gap of two years and five months – and yearning for the same. I once worked out that for this to have happened I’d have needed to be pregnant by August last year.

Both of Ryan’s brothers have two children four years apart, so maybe we could aim for that? But that would mean being pregnant by February. I can’t carry a pregnancy so my next step would be fertility treatment in order to freeze eggs and embryos, but I’m currently experiencing an autoimmune flare-up so who knows when I’ll be well enough for that? Then there’s the rigmarole of finding a surrogate… let’s just say a February conception looks unlikely.

It’s made harder when people ask, ‘Are you going to give Leo a sibling?’ Quite frankly, I’d like to say, ‘None of your f***ing business’, but I’m happy to discuss it here if only to try to alleviate the pain for others, because secondary infertility is a very real problem.

Recently I was at an event for the Birth Trauma Association’s 20th anniversary when someone said to me, ‘Don’t worry, when I had my second child it was much better.’ I replied, ‘I’m not sure that’s a possibility for me,’ in the most courteous way I could muster. Only this morning someone slid into my DMs asking, ‘Do you ever consider another child?’

Even the two women I relied on most through the worst months early on in my recovery – who experienced debilitating PTSD and postnatal depression – have gone on to have second children. I can’t avoid the issue – it is everywhere – but I also cannot compare myself to them because in so many ways I am lucky.

While a huge part of me would love to grow our family, the emotional investment feels enormous. Discussions around fertility can evoke such strong emotions, anxiety and sadness, that Ryan and I generally shy away from talking about it. We don’t need any more turmoil.

So, for now, I’m trying not to live in the pressure cooker of other people’s expectations. If you constantly question whether you’re missing something, you’ll never be happy. If you go looking for the five-bed semidetached house in Surrey with bi-fold doors and a garage, a baby boy followed by a girl two years later, then you’re sure as sh*t going to end up feeling like the world’s biggest failure when life has other plans. Or when you simply discover that ticking every box on the middle-class lifestyle checklist isn’t a fast-track to happiness.

I once blithely assumed these were all the things I wanted, too, but the tough lesson I had to learn is that health, stability and inner calm are what’s important – no amount of fancy Crittall doors will give me those.

As some of you may know, after writing this column I was taken ill and have been in hospital. Happy to say that I’m recuperating at home now and Leo still had a blast on his birthday. And no, I did not attempt to bake a cake!