My biggest creative project yet...

I’m having a baby 👶

Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. Today, I’m sharing some exciting personal news.

Pregnant! According to my app, baby is the size of a bunch of grapes 🍇

After more than a year of fertility treatment, I am delighted to share that my wife and I are expecting our first child in the Spring. As I write these words, I can feel baby wriggling around in my belly. It’s a thrilling, terrifying moment and I’m so excited to share it with you.

Like most queer couples, our journey to this point has not been straightforward. I’m doing the gestational labour in our household, and my body has been through a menu of invasive medical procedures. We’ve been through our share of painful disappointments and setbacks.

The most devastating loss happened a year ago this week. We lost Budino (our beloved elder cat) and a few days later, I had a miscarriage. We went from being a household of two adults, two cats and 1 gestational child to being a household of two adults and one cat.

It broke my heart to lose a child. It was early in the pregnancy and I didn’t feel “allowed” to be that sad, but I was devastated¹. Absorbing stories from other women who’ve been through it really helped. In particular, I want to shout out So Heavy a Weight which my pal Sarah sent to me not knowing just how resonant it would be. When my emotional resolve finally cracked and I sobbed late into the night, it was the stories in this book that kept me afloat.

My wife and I have also been exceedingly fortunate. Human fertility often seems entirely random, and it’s the root of enormous pain for a lot of people. There’s a parallel universe where we could have spent the money (€10k+) and more than a year of our lives without ending up with a child. I could have endured all the medical interventions, the unintended side effects, hundreds of injections and medications and months of manipulating my body’s hormonal equilibrium only to be left with nothing. It’s some combination of good fortune, biology and magic that has meant this isn’t our story.

Like most things in life, writing has gotten me through.

Every morning, I return to my journal and sort my way through the tangle of emotions that has taken root overnight. I wrote about the miscarriage. I wrote about missing my mother while I was trying to become one. I wrote about the creepiness of manipulating your body’s hormones, and what it felt like to exist within the haunted house of my body. I wrote about the joy of a positive pregnancy test, and the anxiety of the first trimester. Right now, I’m writing about my fears about giving birth and what it’ll be like to keep a tiny, defenceless child alive in this harsh, crumbling world.

There’s so much I want to say about this experience from the choice to become a parent to the (many!) indignities of the process. I thought I’d have those essays ready to go by the time baby arrived. I planned to borrow some inspiration from Ann Friedman who published essays about her pregnancy during her maternity leave. But my body has been so occupied with gestational labour that I haven’t managed to get those essays ready for publication. Gestational labour is creative labour. My body has been knitting eyebrows and constructing joints and creating the consciousness that will be this new person’s mind. I will share those essays someday, but I’ve had to let go of the deadlines I placed around them. My body is prioritising another creative project - it’s biggest yet! - and I want to honour that instinct.

I was expecting to have to make all kinds of life and career sacrifices once baby arrived, but I didn’t think those sacrifices would begin long before baby even existed. “Sacrifice” is the wrong word. These are choices I’ve happily made, though I’m continuing to learn the humbling lesson that I can’t work like I used to. My brain and body are oriented in a new direction, and that change has happened so much sooner than I anticipated².

What will this mean for my newsletter?

I plan to keep writing to you each week until March. Between April and September, I will pause paid subscriptions so I can prioritise time with our new baby. My monthly creative gatherings will also pause during this time.

I might share an essay or two during this time, if it feels right. Or I might feel the need to disconnect more completely from the internet. I don’t know yet, but I plan to trust my instincts. What I know for sure is that I will continue to write for myself (as much as I can), and that I will return to work with fresh energy, perspectives and ideas to share.

I hope you’ll stick with me through this next chapter. I am thrilled and delighted to become a mother, but also scared. More than anything, I feel astoundingly lucky to have a chance at this new chapter. For so many years, the idea of a happy family life felt entirely beyond me. I still can’t quite belive that it’s happening, that I will soon be somebody’s mother, but I am so grateful that it is.

An important aside:

There is public funding available for couples in Ireland who want to pursue fertility treatment. However, only heterosexual couples are eligible to apply. The Irish state is explicitly prioritising the creation and support of heterosexual families and excluding of relationships and families like mine. I wrote about this back in 2023, and was enraged by the injustice of it. Over the last year, my wife and I have been directly impacted by this discriminatory policy. We’ve had to make financial decisions to protect our family that we wouldn’t have had to make if one of us were a man. That’s been a whole other strand of fury to process during this difficult time, and it’s something that I plan to write about much more in the future.

For now, here are the previous articles I’ve written on this subject:

Why I'm still writing about queer fertility issues

State funded fertility treatment should not discriminate against queer couples (published in The Irish Examiner, August 2023)

‘Why are we an afterthought?’ — LGBT+ couples left out of State-funded fertility treatment (published in The Irish Examiner, September 2023)

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💬 In the comments, I’d love to hear your reflections on this new chapter.

1. To be clear, I would never think this way about any other woman who experienced pregnancy loss, but I struggled to extend the same compassion to myself.

2. It’s also an indication of a broader shift that I’ve felt happening in my work, something that I’ve been feeling for months but haven’t really figured out how to articulate yet. I’m sure it will become much clearer once baby arrives and explodes our worlds in the best way.