When I met Katie, my current wife, I had already been married before and had a young son. While the marriage had not worked out, the subsequent estrangement from 1-year-old Dave was an unbearable consequence of the divorce. I was adamant that I did not want any more children if I could not be a proper and present father to the child I already had.
When I told Katie about this — many, many months before I asked her to marry me — she was clearly heartbroken, and I thought that it may just be the end of our otherwise perfect relationship. But we talked through it, and Katie was finally able to agree that our love was worth it, no matter what. Our part-time custody of little Dave would be enough, she said, as long as she still had me.
When Katie and I got married it truly was the happiest day of my life, and occasionally I considered how selfish I was being, and wondered if I could give her the baby she craved — create our own little family. But every time I had to hand Dave back over to his mother, I remembered the pain of everything I was missing. I had missed Dave’ first steps, first proper words — first everything. I couldn’t and wouldn’t go through that again.
Katie was wonderful with my son, and every weekend I realised how unfair I was being. But knowing my reasons for not wanting more children, my beautiful, selfless wife never said a word after we were married — though I’m sure she shed many tears in private.
Around the time that Katie and I shared our fifth wedding anniversary, my son turned eight and suddenly got very, very sick. My little boy was diagnosed with a rare type of leukaemia. He needed a bone marrow transplant or he would die.
My ex-wife, Maria, and I were not a match, and there was no match on the national donor register either. Our best chance, we were told, was to provide a sibling for Dave. I asked if Katie and I had a baby what the chances would be that he or she would be a match, only to be informed that with a different mother, statistically, the chance of it being a match would be the same as if it were a complete stranger. I was glad that Katie wasn’t at the doctor’s office to find out how close I had come to making her a mother — but if it wasn’t going to help Dave, what was the point?
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