It’s taken me nearly every one of my fifty odd years to come to this point – where I’m going to express something that I’ve bottled up. A deep, dark secret, shaped from sadness. It is that I have always dreamt of being a mother. I have always longed to be a mother. I always planned that I would be a mother and I mourn that I am not. In primary school my teacher asked me: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “I want to be just like my mum", I said, "with a big round belly full of babies. I want to be a mum.” My teacher smiled, laughed and replied: “You wouldn't want that.” When I tell people that my one absolute sadness, my one absolute pain, is not being a mother, they variously palm me off with, "you don't know how lucky you are to not be", "I wish someone would take mine!" and the most common one, "children are such a worry, that's why you look young!" Lucky me eh? I think children can be a headache and I know that you probably never stop worrying about them, and I think they might age you, and I know you may sometimes regret them – just occasionally. But I'll never really know any of this because I'm not a mother. I genuinely believe it was something I was born to be, but circumstance, the times I have lived through, and my own lack of courage – that I could do this on my own by adopting as an HIV positive trans woman – have all meant that I am not a mother, not a parent. Strangely, as I've grown older, the pain hasn't dimmed. I expected it would. I expected that having a seemingly comfortable life would be enough. I thought I'd become more absorbed in books, in words, in flowers, trees, art, walks, my dogs, my work. But it isn't enough. The pain grows. I know that this might seem like a comfortable, faintly middle class pain and in many ways I should just put up and perhaps allow only silent reflection. But as I write this down, I feel like I'm honouring something that has taken up a vast part of my life – and yet leaves me feeling empty. I got into trouble for selling methadone and my first thought was 'what would my children think of me?' And then, 'I'll never be able to adopt now'. I remember the shame in my school when a girl who was about 13 or 14 got pregnant. It swept through the school like a warm summer breeze; the gossip, the horror. I was in a Social and Economic History Lesson when I found out and I felt numb. I felt tears in my eyes. I stared at the blackboard and I knew that her world was the world I wanted; I wanted to swap, to have her shame and to have her belly.