It was the fourth meeting that Nadia had attended. The relinquishing mothers group met on the second Thursday of the month, always at the same time – ten am – always in the same church hall. Nadia no longer felt like the new girl. She looked forward to the hour that she spent with Tracey and the other women, because with them, she didn’t need to explain herself. They managed to put into words everything she was feeling.
Eddie didn’t know she came here; no one did. He’d gone back to normal life: the meetings and emails and dinners and squash games and Saturday morning kids’ sports, as if nothing had ever happened, as if the last four years since this whole surrogacy started were irrelevant. He rarely talked about Louise, and he never asked Nadia how she was doing. Eddie – and everyone else – just assumed that she had moved on. But that had been their deal, Nadia reminded herself. Just the pregnancy, then it was over. Then they’d get back to normal and no one else in the family would suffer. And she was trying her best to stick to that.
Tracey closed the wooden doors and Nadia settled back in her chair with her paper cup of tea. She drew her thin cardigan around herself – the weather was cooling as autumn edged towards winter – and smiled at the three women already seated; they smiled back. She knew very little about them, other than their regrets at having lost their children, yet she felt close to them, knowing that they all kept the same secrets from their family and friends.
‘Good morning, ladies,’ Tracey said. ‘And how are we all today?’
Nadia smiled, mumbled ‘good’ along with the others, then Jill, one of the women in the group, began. She was trying to find her son; she’d only been sixteen when he was born. She’d been unmarried, unemployed, and poorly educated. Not good mother material at all, according to the nuns who persuaded her that her infant son would be better off with another family.
‘I’ve got all the paperwork to start the search,’ Jill said, ‘but I can’t bring myself to send it in.’ She reached into her handbag and took out an envelope, addressed and stamped. ‘It’s in here, but I just can’t seem to drop it in the postbox.’
‘What are you scared of, Jill?’ asked Tracey. Everyone in the room knew the answer.
‘I’m scared that he won’t want to see me. I’m scared he’ll reject me, that he’ll be angry at me. That he’ll think I was too weak to fight for him, or that I didn’t love him enough. And if I don’t send it, then I can keep the fantasy in my head that when we meet, he’ll run into my arms and we’ll have a relationship. But if I send it, I risk losing all hope and being worse off than I am now.’
‘But you cry for him every day, Jill, you told us last time,’ Tracey said softly, leaning forwards in her chair. ‘Can it get any worse than it is now?’
Jill blew her nose on a paper tissue while they continued the discussion. Nadia said nothing, but struggled to keep herself from breaking down too. It was impossible not to feel Jill’s anguish; it was the same pain that Nadia felt.
When it was her turn, Nadia put her tea down on the floor, then updated them on the past month. ‘I’ve been seeing more of Louise recently. So I’m glad we moved here, even though it’s been tough on the kids starting a new school. They’ve been acting up a bit, especially Violet, my middle child. She’s been so demanding of my time. I had hoped Eddie would be around more with us living closer to the city, but, well …’ She broke off. ‘Anyway. The good thing is that I’ve been able to spend more time with Louise. Lachlan – her dad – has been letting me take her out on my own while Zoe’s at work, just for an hour here and there. I take her to the park, or for a walk, or we go to my house for a snack. It’s been …’ She thought about the times with Louise. How could she explain the feeling she had when she was with her? ‘It’s been wonderful,’ she said. ‘I can’t describe it other than to say that it feels as if everything’s right and it’s exactly how it should be.’
‘As if you fit together perfectly?’ one of the women said.
Nadia nodded, thinking of the way Louise was once tucked up tight in her belly, a perfect fit. ‘Yes. Exactly. That’s why this is all so hard. I tell myself it’s wrong, that she’s not mine any more, but when I see her, it’s as if she is one of my children.’
‘That’s because she is,’ Jill said.
There were murmurs of agreement from the group and Nadia looked round at them all, nodding a little. She knew that they were encouraging her relationship with Louise, because in Nadia, they saw the chance that they never had. But she also knew that they were biased, that this was a group of women who hadn’t been able to forget and move forward – the women who had got on with their lives, maybe the majority, were out there living happily. That was one of the reasons why she hadn’t told Eddie that she’d been coming here; she knew what he’d say. He’d say that she was just prolonging her grief by talking about how hard it was and reliving the trauma through women who’d had no choice but to completely let go. Perhaps he was right. Was the relationship she had now with Louise enough? She saw her at least a couple of times a week. Lachlan seemed uninterested in Louise a lot of the time, only too happy for Nadia to spend time alone with her. But handing her back was like torture.
The others were looking at her, waiting for her to speak again. But there was no pressure; they all got lost in thoughts during these sessions. For everyone except for Nadia, their thoughts were the only place they could see their children. But she wasn’t the same as them, Nadia reminded herself. She had gone into this voluntarily. She had known what she was signing up for before she was pregnant. Perhaps she’d been naive, but she’d become pregnant with the sole purpose of relinquishing the child. Not like Jill and Tracey and the others; their children had been taken from them against their will.
Nadia cleared her throat. ‘Sorry. Sorry … I was miles away. You’re right, Jill. Louise is my child, biologically. But I’ve got no one to blame, no one to be angry at apart from myself. You can all point at someone – the church, the state, your families – and say that they made you do it, that you had no choice. I know you say I’m the same as you – and I thank you for making me feel so welcome here – but I’m not the same as you, because I did this to myself.’
Tracey shook her head. ‘No, Nadia, you’re wrong. We all thought that we made the decision ourselves. None of our children …’ She swept her arm around the room. ‘None of our children were wrenched from us. We all thought we were doing the right thing. Just as you do now. You’re thinking what we thought twenty years ago, that we made the decision voluntarily. But the fact that you’re here says to me that you felt the same pressures that we did – pressure to do the right thing, pressure to conform, pressure to give in to everyone else’s expectations, but in the process, that pressure means that the decision hasn’t been made voluntarily at all.’
‘I’d give anything to be in your position, Nadia,’ Jill said, leaning forwards in her seat and looking right at her. ‘You still see your child. And you still have options. Don’t let anyone tell you that Louise doesn’t belong with you. You’re her mother.’
Nadia had tears rolling down her cheeks and her head felt like it was going to burst. She didn’t want to hear this, and yet it was exactly what she needed to hear. She was vulnerable, she knew that, open to suggestion. But she desperately wanted to agree with them, to ask for their help and strength to stand up for her rights as a mother. Rights, she reminded herself grimly, that she had relinquished when she signed the papers over to Zoe, her little sister, a kind, generous, and desperately unlucky woman who was also a wonderful mother to Louise.