By Editor,Elizabeth Day

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I was distraught and heartbroken after six failed pregnancies. Then I finally found peace… thanks to this chance encounter: ELIZABETH DAY

By ELIZABETH DAY

Published: 01:38 BST, 30 September 2025 | Updated: 01:38 BST, 30 September 2025

On December 29, 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x.’

I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway.

Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape.

So, it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar and punctuation. There was just one thing.

I wasn’t a mother.

Three days previously, my husband, Justin, and I had flown to Los Angeles for our latest round of fertility treatment. This time, we had opted to try for pregnancy using an egg donor. We’d had the embryo transferred the morning after our plane landed.

I’d had a totally sober festive season until that point, sipping non-alcoholic wine to accompany the Christmas roast. My cocktails had been a carefully calibrated combination of oestrogen and progesterone rather than the kind I generally preferred, which were served in ice-cold martini glasses with extra brine.

Justin and I hadn’t chosen for this to be our Christmas but when you go through fertility treatment, timing as it exists for other people is beyond your control. You are at the mercy of hormonal fluctuations, the thickness (or otherwise) of your uterine lining and the inconsistent vagaries of menstrual cycles.

After 12 years of failing to have babies, it would be a psychic, rather than a baby, who would change Elizabeth Day’s life for ever

And so, in the grip of existential uncertainty, I had started looking for signs. Call it superstition, spirituality or plain old stupidity, but I saluted pairs of magpies and took care not to walk under ladders.

I saw meaning in everything – a dream, a floating feather, a robin redbreast who turned up in the garden one unseasonably warm day in July. The universe was signalling that I was destined to have a child.

At some level, I realised this was unhinged. I understood that, in the sea of my own sadness, I had latched on to any passing piece of driftwood to keep afloat. On I clung.

I told myself that receiving that text calling me ‘mum’ was the surest sign yet that I was on the right path, so I replied with extra care and kindness to that unknown texter using their friend’s WhatsApp number.

I said they’d got the wrong person but I hoped everything would be sorted out. As I returned my phone to my pocket, I thought back to the preceding years of unsuccessful fertility treatment and recurrent miscarriage.

I thought of the slow-motion grief they had caused me; the belief that I would never be fulfilled unless I had a baby. I thought of the difficult decision Justin and I had taken to pursue egg donation. I thought of the embryo now nesting inside me. And I thought: it was all meant to be. It led us here.

This would turn out to be true, but not in the way I had anticipated. Because it would be a psychic, rather than a baby, who would change my life for ever.

I’d spent the previous 12 years failing to have babies. During my first marriage, I’d had two unsuccessful rounds of IVF followed by a ‘natural’ pregnancy, which I lost at three months.

By the time Elizabeth met Justin, she was 39 and he was 43, with three children from a previous relationship. ‘I decided I would try to be happy without a baby of my own,’ she says

I was in hospital for that miscarriage and can still recall seeing the blotted, bloodied remains of my much-longed-for child in a kidney-shaped cardboard tray the nurses had given me. Some months later, that marriage ended in the throes of a peculiar sadness: simultaneous grief for what was, for what might have been, and for what had never existed.

I thought I was dealing with it but, in truth, I was numb. There seemed to be no way of communicating the magnitude of the loss. Not back then, anyway, when miscarriage and infertility were still barely talked about.

In my late 30s, I did a cycle of egg-freezing at a different clinic. I was told my results were disappointing: two eggs, where most women my age could have expected about 15.

By the time I met Justin, I was 39 and he was 43, with three children from a previous relationship. I decided I would try to be happy without a baby of my own. But then we got pregnant naturally just after my 41st birthday. That ended in miscarriage at seven weeks. We were both so devastated we realised we wanted to try again.

We travelled to Athens, Greece, to a new clinic and a new set of protocols, and I had an operation to remove a uterine septum. Within a month, I was pregnant again. At seven weeks, we had a scan and saw and heard a heartbeat. At eight weeks, the heartbeat had gone.

By now, the UK was in the grip of its first national Covid lockdown. I took pills to trigger a miscarriage at home. The pain was horrendous. Of my three miscarriages, this was the worst to get through.

I took a few months off the ceaseless trying in order to feel my way back into my own body, to reconnect with who I was when I wasn’t riding a wave of pregnancy hormones, or having my insides prodded and scanned and examined by unfamiliar hands.

When Covid restrictions started to lift, I was allowed to book a sports massage. The masseur was Polish and when he began working on the left-hand side of my lower stomach, I gasped. He had pressed the exact point where I felt the aching, yawning tenderness of pregnancy loss. I thought I might faint.

‘You have a lot of sadness here,’ the masseur said.

‘Yes,’ I replied, eyes closed, trying not to cry.

When Elizabeth was 41 she got pregnant naturally, but that ended in miscarriage at seven weeks. She and Justin were both devastated but they realised they wanted to try again

We had been recommended a place in LA by friends. This clinic, we were told, was at the forefront of fertility medicine (‘Because lots of Hollywood stars get to their late 40s and the acting parts dry up and then they decide they want a child’, said one of my more cynical acquaintances).

The clinic’s website looked impressive and claimed to offer several cutting-edge procedures that weren’t available anywhere else.

In October 2021, Justin and I joined a Zoom call with one of the leading consultants, who apparently had a legion of celebrity children to his name. He listed all the ways in which he could ensure higher than average success rates and advised egg donation.

All we had to do was find a suitable donor, for which he recommended hiring a ‘fertility consultant’. This person would assess relevant medical histories and physical traits in potential donors to ensure their compatibility.

In the UK, it is illegal to pay someone for their eggs but donors can receive up to £985 expenses per cycle. Donor-conceived children then have the right to access identifying information about their donor when they turn 18.

But in the US donors are paid a fee – typically, $5,000 to $10,000 (£3,700 to £7,500), but sometimes tens of thousands of dollars – and you can access hundreds of websites containing extensive profiles and photographs.

It was surreal and a little dystopian, scrolling through pages upon pages of beautiful women whom you could filter according to height, education, hair and eye colour. They listed their preferred foods and hobbies. It felt like a strange kind of speed dating.

Since 2018, Elizabeth has had a podcast called How To Fail, where she interview guests about three times they’ve failed in their lives and what they might have learned along the way

It took us over a year to find our donor. We got close a few times, but then we’d uncover some incompatible medical issue or they would change their minds and pull out. We also got defrauded by the consultant we’d hired, and the clinic was shockingly poor in its communication.

The whole thing cost an inordinate amount of time and money, and I’m aware of my privilege in being able – just about – to afford it. Still, it was one of the most stressful periods of my life.

Eventually, we found an amazing young woman who wanted to help us. We remain so incredibly grateful to her.

The donor’s egg retrieval was scheduled in LA. On the other side of the Atlantic, my reproductive cycle was synced with hers. The eggs were then fertilised with my husband’s sperm, resulting in four embryos, two of which were deemed to have a good cell number, minimal fragmentation and optimal symmetry.

The embryos were awarded an AA grade, as if they were premium hotels. Apparently, these two had the highest chances of implantation in my womb.

We flew out to LA on Boxing Day 2022. The weather was terrible – one of those freak patches of torrential rain that sometimes beset the city – and our windscreen wipers squeaked and slid across the glass as we drove to the clinic.

I changed into a surgical gown and lay on a trolley before being wheeled into theatre to have the embryo transferred via catheter to my womb. Before I was sedated, our doctor beamed a picture of our chosen embryo on to a TV screen hung high up on the wall.

‘An absolutely beautiful embryo,’ he said.

In the ten-day waiting period that followed, Justin had to return to London for work and I stayed in LA, with a quietly blooming feeling of cautious optimism.

I had all the pregnancy symptoms – mid-afternoon exhaustion, nausea, sore boobs, vivid dreams. I went for a walk along Venice Beach one afternoon and wrote the name we’d picked out for our child in the sand.

On the allotted morning, I went into the clinic for a blood test and was told I’d be phoned that afternoon with the results. Instead, they sent me an email. They had analysed my bloods. I wasn’t pregnant. ‘Cease all medication immediately,’ the email read.

Those symptoms I’d been experiencing? They were simply a result of the hormones I’d been taking. And all those signs I’d believed had been sent from the universe? They hadn’t meant a thing either.

I was a sceptic until a psychic connected me to my dead husband

Justin cancelled everything and flew back to LA so we could be together – an act of love, if ever there was one. But I felt unmoored and exhausted and horribly sad.

Back in London, I wasn’t sure what to do next. We still had one embryo left. The clinic advised us to try again straight away, possibly with a surrogate, but I just couldn’t face it.

I went for breakfast with a friend. She had recently split from a long-term partner and, in passing, mentioned a psychic who had given her a freakishly accurate telephone reading in which a future romance was outlined in detail. And even though I thought I was done with that woo‑woo stuff, I just couldn’t help myself.

‘Could I speak to her?’ I asked. The psychic, whom I will call Alexia, didn’t know my full name but she identified that I love words – I had written eight books when I spoke to her and my ninth was about to be published.

‘OK, so you write books but do you also do something else?’ Alexia continued. ‘I’m getting . . . it’s almost like, I don’t know . . . you’re a life coach helping people through their failures or mistakes?’

Since 2018, I’ve had a podcast called How To Fail, where I interview guests about three times they’ve failed in their lives and what they might have learned along the way. Not quite life coaching, but not a million miles away either. After about 40 minutes, Alexia said: ‘I feel as if you’re grappling with letting go of a lifelong desire. You don’t know whether to let it go or not.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I replied, on the other end of the phone line. ‘That makes sense.’

‘I don’t know whether it’s to do with children but, if it is, I want to tell you – and I don’t always talk about past lives, but with you I get a very strong sense that you were a mother in a past life. You were the mother of six and it almost melted you.’

It was such a striking phrase that I noted it down afterwards. ‘Melted’ was the precise word she used.

‘And I feel this life has been offered to you to live on your own terms,’ Alexia continued. ‘Which might be why, if you’ve tried to have babies before now, you could have experienced fertility issues or miscarriage.’

I was dumbstruck. The number six was particularly important. I’d had three miscarriages and undergone three unsuccessful rounds of fertility treatment and each cycle had ended after an embryo transfer. Essentially, I’d had six failed pregnancies.

A few months after her experience with the psychic, Elizabeth started writing a new novel. ‘It was the most fun and creatively fulfilling experience I’ve ever had writing a book,’ she says

She told me a story about a relative whose child had been in a car accident and who was now in a persistent vegetative state. It had been a living tragedy, Alexia said, and so, really, there was no guarantee that having a child led to the happiness we yearn for.

‘I hope you don’t mind me sharing that,’ Alexia said.

‘No, no, of course not.’

In truth, I was grateful. So often during the preceding 12 years I’d told myself a hundred different fairy tales of how completed I’d feel by motherhood. But in a world where the most positive version of events exists, there also has to be the possibility of the most negative, too: a child who is ill or unhappy or who doesn’t love you back.

Alexia gave me permission to imagine that. She gave me permission to stop trying so hard without it feeling like weakness.

Because, sometimes, quitting, not persisting, is the bravest thing you can do. I started to wonder whether all those signs from the universe (or whatever you want to call it) were in fact guiding me, but the destination wasn’t the one I’d pictured, so I was interpreting them wrongly.

I started asking myself: what if my purpose in this lifetime was not to be a mother?

What if, instead, it was to speak for others who go through similar pain and to reassure them that there is hope on the other side of it?

What if I chose to focus on the abundance of love I already had in my life, rather than the absence of another kind? We cannot, all of us, have everything.

The next day, I walked past a woman pushing her child in a buggy in the street. I smiled at her. All the bitterness and angst I had felt for so long had evaporated. It was magical; almost miraculous.

At first, I didn’t think the sensation would last. Yet now, almost three years later, I still feel that same lifted peace. Sometimes, the sadness will rear up in unexpected moments and I’ve learned to let it, because I know it will pass.

A few months after my experience with Alexia, I started writing a new novel. The plot and the characters came to me in a blissful rush. I wrote as if the brakes had been taken off, as if I were no longer pushing a metaphorical boulder up an unforgiving hill. I wrote, in short, as if being myself was enough.

It was the most fun and creatively fulfilling experience I’ve ever had writing a book. It will be published a few days after the baby whose name I wrote in the sand would have turned two.

And that text I received from the kid with the broken phone? I Googled it recently. It’s an internet scam. I suppose it could have been a sign from the universe to stop believing false promises.

But maybe it wasn’t a sign at all. Maybe our task in this world is to build our own meanings – like fires lit from the kindling of many lives.

© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2025

One Of Us by Elizabeth Day (£18.99, HarperCollins) is out now.

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I was distraught and heartbroken after six failed pregnancies. Then I finally found peace… thanks to this chance encounter: ELIZABETH DAY

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