I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can recall. As a child, I had no friends my own age. At school, I preferred to play imaginary games with the younger kids in the playground. I’d be the kind matron of an orphanage, or the babysitter of a giant rabble. The little ones loved the attention of an older girl; they’d run up to me asking to play. I’d give them sticks and pebbles for their dinner, then put them to bed in the sandpit. It interests me, now, that I never played at being their mother. At nine years old, I liked to imagine myself as a gorgeous woman in my twenties, dressed in flared jeans with stars on the pockets and red cowboy boots. I didn’t think it was possible to look that way and to have also carried a baby. Perhaps deep down I knew that my body would never become pregnant anyway, because of the three miscarriages my mother suffered, in quick succession, the year I turned six. In my child’s mind, I was unable to separate that word—*pregnant*—from the image of a toilet filled with blood.…