June is the cruellest month

This month marks the anniversary not only of my miscarriage, but also of my mother's death.

It is seventeen years today since my mother died. She had just turned forty-four. I was nineteen.

In the first few weeks and months after her death, I thought that I would somehow sense her presence, or hear her voice. It took me a long time to accept the finality of death, that my mother had gone and was never coming back. Even now, I still dream about her. In those dreams, she hasn't come back to pass on some significant piece of advice or family lore, instead she is just simply there - sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup or tea, or else stirring something on the stove. I wake up and, just for a split second, I am able to believe that she never really went away. But then the fact of her dying registers with renewed violence, and suddenly I am reduced not even to a young woman struggling to find her way in the adult world without a mother's guidance, but to a little girl who wants her mummy.

As many feminist psychologists and psychoanalysts have suggested, the experience of motherhood inevitably stirs up a woman's memories and fantasies surrounding her own mother. In becoming a mother herself, a woman identifies--whether consciously or unconsciously--with her mother. She tends to use her childhood experiences as a blueprint for her own mothering. For the motherless woman, motherhood thus holds out a particular promise: it enables her to re-enter the mother-child relationship, and hence to reconnect with her own mother.

Infertility has robbed me of that chance. Instead, as I mourn both the mother I once had, and the child I might have had, I feel that my links with what Jungian analyst Naomi Lowinsky calls the "motherline" have been irrevocably severed. I feel lost. Cast adrift. And it is at moments such as this that it seems that all I am ever going to feel is grief, loss and emptiness.