MY PETER PAN

AIl children, except one, grow up... That's the first line from Peter Pan, one of my favourite books. But until my first child, Rufus, was born, I had no idea how much it could mean.

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It was March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept into the UK, when I discovered I was pregnant with Rufus. My fiance Billy, then 34, and I had spoken about children right from the beginning of our relationship and holding that positive pregnancy test was one of the happiest moments of our lives. At 20 weeks, we discovered we were having a boy and after whittling down a list of names, we picked out Rufus. It meant red-headed and even though Billy and I had dark hair, I just had an intuition that the name would suit our boy. Counting down the days until we met him, we started to prepare for his arrival.

Painting the nursery white, we decided on a safari theme and decorated the walls with animal stickers. I treasured each and every tiny kick, and Billy and I would call it ‘our time’ each morning as we lay in bed, cradling my bump and feeling Rufus moving around.

But one morning, at 39 weeks, the day before I was due to head off on maternity leave from my job in recruitment, we couldn’t feel Rufus moving. ‘I’m sure everything is fine,’ Billy reassured me, taking me to the hospital for a check-up. But as the midwife put the doppler to my tummy, she said she couldn’t find a heartbeat. ‘I’m going to get a doctor,’ she said. Still, we thought nothing of it, assuming the doctor would pick up on Rufus’ heartbeat straight away. But as the consultant scanned me again, he looked at us ashen-faced. ‘He’s passed away,’ he said.