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And so I want to call this a miracle, but not in the way I might have meant that when I was younger. I don’t mean that God was suddenly convinced by everybody’s prayers to relent and give us a baby, and so dropped one down upon us from the sky. I don’t mean that it’s some kind of supernatural out-of-this-world intervention.

Grief from loss or tragedy, from something that has happened, is one thing. But it’s a different thing entirely trying to figure out what to feel and how to process grief when something hasn’t happened. In many respects it’s a less distinct thing to grieve as you’re unable to point to some definitive experience and say “look at this terrible thing!”

An ancient wisdom saying in the Jewish text tells us that “hope deferred makes the heart sick” and so in many respects my response here was entirely understandable. The avoidance of hope is a wonderful self-protection mechanism, because despite the remarkable resilience of the human spirit there can come a time when this resilience is worn down. Especially if our youthful invincibility comes face-to-face with the real fragility of the human experience.

In this moment I had no choice. It became immediately obvious how much I wanted to be a Dad, and the extent to which I’d already allowed myself to enter into the reality of love for a child that was no longer going to find its way into the world. I sobbed uncontrollably for over an hour. Waves and waves of grief and emotion pulsing through my body beyond my control. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was primal anguish and grief, it was years of disappointment that had been overcome in joy and then cruelly taken away in an instant. It was as though the ground gave way beneath my feet. Hannah arrived home and we wept together; something I don’t think we’d ever done before – not with me joining in anyway.

I had a deep and abiding sense that this was somehow about me. It was my body, my sperm, my “samples” that were letting us down. And I felt like less of a person because of it. It is such a curious thing, the feeling of being less of a person because of something that you cannot control. Because other than general efforts at being healthy, there was literally nothing I could do about my own body. So why did it make me feel like a failure, like I was less than sufficient?

The phrase - “when the time is right” - became a common refrain over the coming months and years. Because after 12 months of not using contraception, all we had to show for it were a couple of late periods and some failed pregnancy tests. But, it’ll happen when the time is right, we told ourselves. These things have a way of working out. God has a way of making things happen just when they’re supposed to.