Miles Apart. Annabel Bower
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it. It’s hard, it’s exhausting and it’s lonely. Sadly, others have been there before us and many will follow. If only we could all talk about this topic more openly, I think that would make the journey through baby loss just that little bit easier.
To the little boy who I will always see missing at my kitchen table, who will never get to be part of the beautiful chaos that is my family: we love you and miss you every single day. Not one day goes by that I don’t imagine who you would have become.
For Miles: Miles apart, forever in my heart.
Chapter 1 My Family
Life doesn’t always go to plan. We hope it will, but there are many things that are completely out of our control, especially when it comes to starting or creating a family. Miles was a planned, much-wanted baby. My husband Josh and I were incredibly excited when we saw those two positive lines on the pregnancy test. I immediately began to imagine our future with a new addition to the family. These days, four children is considered a big family, but it’s what we wanted. When Josh told a mate he was off to meet me for the twelve-week scan, his friend replied, “Is Annabel fucking mad? Four kids!?”. Maybe I was, but it was what I’d hoped for. My journey through motherhood had not unfolded as I’d hoped in my girlhood dreams – there had been a few challenges along the way – but Josh and I didn’t hesitate when we decided to have a “fourth and final baby”.
My two older boys, Alfie and Ted, are from my first marriage. Their dad and I had known each other since we were teens. We started dating in our mid-twenties and married when we were both twenty-seven. Alfie arrived one week before our first wedding anniversary and Ted twenty-one months after his brother. Sadly, our marriage broke down after four years. I was devastated that my family was torn apart and terrified of what the future might hold for me as a single mum. This family was far from what I had pictured for myself.
Many of my friends were planning their weddings or having their first babies while my marriage was disintegrating. I hated being the single mother at friends’ barbecues, arriving with my bowl of potato salad, never quite at ease, as no one was there to help me keep an eye on the boys or lighten the burden of always having to be on guard. Heading home to an empty house, I missed having someone to share my funny stories about the boys with. It was an exhausting, lonely time. I grieved the end of my marriage and naively thought that if I could survive this, I could survive anything. Little did I know that it was just a warm-up for the future. The pain of my divorce would be insignificant compared to my pain at losing my child.
During the divorce, I put on a brave face and tried to just get on with things. I gritted my teeth through conversations with other mums who said things like, I know how you feel, I’m practically a single mum myself as my husband works so much. I couldn’t be bothered explaining to them that having limited help with the kids was one small part of being a single parent: it was the financial responsibilities, lack of companionship and permanent mental and physical juggle with zero respite that really wore me down. Doing the lion’s share of the parenting was the least of my worries.
I hated feeling pitied. I was sick of worrying that having divorced parents would mess the boys up forever. I just wanted to do my best to get through it. I did consume a fair bit of white wine, though I can’t necessarily blame that on divorce. Having two boys close together in age can surely do that to the toughest of mothers! Fast forward several years and – hand on heart – I can say that everything worked out for the best. My ex-husband and I both remarried and we all get along. The kids are happy, well-adjusted and as far as I can tell, unaffected by the divorce (even if at times, it would be handy to blame really naughty behavior on it!).
During the process of separation, I went back to work. Before having children, I worked in events and catering for a big corporate firm. It couldn’t be done part-time, so I resigned rather than take paid leave. When Alfie turned one, I was working out what to do with my career – only to find out I was pregnant with Ted. I decided to stay home and go back to work once both boys were older. I had run my own catering company in my early twenties and was keen to get back into it, combining it with motherhood. So when I found myself suddenly single and needing to go back to work, I initially worked for a very good friend who owned her own catering company. Eighteen months later, it was time to go back out on my own again.
The only problem was that I had a tiny kitchen, with the worst oven in Australia. If I was going to make my business viable, I would have to renovate. All I needed was a builder. Enter Josh: a friend of a friend who I might have hired to take on the project more for his good looks than his company’s good reputation. I had met him socially at a mutual friend’s birthday lunch, where I was struck by his kindness. Alfie was with me; his little four-year-old arms were struggling to reach the table. Josh picked up a stool and lifted it over to Alfie, who promptly hopped up and began devouring his burger and chips. I thought it was a very sweet thing to do. Apart from that, I didn’t know much about Josh. I spent the rest of the lunch catching up with other friends. That said, he had sparked my interest.
A week or so later, another mutual friend suggested I call Josh to help me with my renovations. It turned out my modest kitchen renovation was much smaller than the kind of builds he normally managed (his usual projects involved stunning architectural renovations, not piddly kitchens). But he had a soft spot for single mothers (he was raised by a rather formidable one), and decided to help me out. Once the plans were approved, he suggested we go out for dinner to celebrate. I rang a friend and asked, “Did your builder take you out for dinner when you signed the contract?” “No,” she answered. “I can’t even get mine to return my bloody phone calls.”
So it would seem I’d bagged myself an excellent builder and a boyfriend, in one fell swoop. The first date turned into a second, soon a third, and before I knew it, he suggested we move in together when my renovations began; not the usual company policy, I can assure you. Josh reasoned that there was no point in us dating for a year before living together, only for him to only realise that living with someone else’s children didn’t suit him. Better to rip off the bandaid and find out, here and now. He joked that if it all went to shit, mine would be the fastest renovation he’d ever done, so he could get me the hell out of his house and back into my own.
After a whirlwind three months of dating, the boys and I packed up and moved in with Josh. Very unorthodox and much faster than even I would have thought appropriate – but we both just knew this was it: we had found the person we wanted to be with. I exhausted myself trying to make it look like my two- and four-year-old boys were angels. Josh says that in these ‘glory days’, as he now refers to them, it was like eating at Ottolenghi every night. Gourmet dinners flying out of the kitchen, laundry folded and actually put away! I went out of my way to make the ‘working mother of small children’ thing look effortless. The poor man – the contrast to today is brutal. It turns out this was completely unnecessary. Josh and the boys got along better than I could have ever dreamed: in fact, I think they liked him more than me most of the time. (He’s way more fun than I am!) Once my renovation was completed three months later, none of us wanted to move back home and away from Josh. A little family had been formed.
The builder, now my husband, still claims I played him like a drum – set the whole thing up in order to snare him – to which I usually respond, “Darling, who in their right mind would make up a renovation in order to meet a man?” That said, it was pretty effective, so I do recommend it. In fact, countless mutual friends had thought to set us up, so we just beat them to the chase.
We were married after a year and immediately started talking about having a baby together. When we’d been together for about a month, Josh had asked me if I was willing (in a general way, not necessarily with him at that early stage) to have more children. It was hugely important to him to have children of his own, even though he thought of my boys as his own and loved them as if they were. For me, the reply was simple and obvious: “Yes, absolutely!” I’d always wanted four kids, so the idea of having more children (albeit in my second marriage) felt completely natural.
Chapter 2 When four becomes five
We started trying for a baby five months after