Mother’s Day is just around the corner.
My beautiful daughter will make me a hand-made card. She’ll drag her dad to the shops and buy me a personal, meaningful gift. Together they’ll make me pancakes for breakfast and they’ll take me out somewhere nice for lunch.
I’ll refuse to do any housework, though I’ll end up ironing her school uniform anyway. And I’ll feel blessed that I’ve been afforded the privilege of raising this amazing kid. She is smart, witty, kind. She is the light of my life, and I know how lucky I am to have her.
There will also be a touch of sadness, though, this Mother’s Day, as with every Mother’s Day, because something is missing. Someone is missing.
You see, I belong to a not-so-exclusive club – the club of one-in-four women who’ve lost a child. One. In. Four. For such a common occurrence, it is a surprisingly silent statistic.

Days like Mother’s Day, like birthdays and anniversaries, are moments of reminder that we one-in-four mark in lonely silence.
This Mother’s Day, I’m preparing myself for a rockier road than usual, as my first novel hits the shelves and I hit the interview circuit. I knew when I was writing this novel that difficult questions would follow. That’s inevitable when you explore in your work the theme of the grief of losing a child.
I never set out to write about such a theme. And when I realised that was where my characters were taking me, I stopped and asked myself two important questions.