We are not that original when it comes to family-building. We started trying for our first child only just before all our friends started trying for their first, and then, as you know, we watched them have one child after another whilst we continued to struggle. The logical mind concludes, therefore, that the reason we know someone whose baby was born around every single last one of our would-have-been-due dates was coincidence, pure and simple. We were enduring consecutive losses, at the same time as everyone around us was having consecutive babies. It's just blind statistics.

What most of you also know, however, is that the mind in crisis is not always logical. The mind in crisis wants to make sense out of senselessness, as if doing so will magically cause the suffering to cease, to be replaced by calmness and order - or at least the intoxicating illusion of it we always used to believe in. My mind in crisis - for a fraction of a second, before reason was able to assert itself firmly once more - somehow managed to picture a connection between our would-have-been-babies and our friends' babies of the same age. I began to superstitiously dread pregnancy announcements almost before I had started to dread our followup beta. I was convinced... no, not convinced. It was ridiculous, I told myself, over and over. I didn't actually believe it at all. Yet, in the absence of any rational explanation for our failures, the irrational explanation that a closeby pregnancy was the thing that would sound the death knell for our little embryos was the only thing I had. So I waited and hoped for the month that I, alone in my circle (excluding, for some reason, the blogosphere), was blessed with that second line. For surely, that month would be the month things finally went our way.

It never happened. What did happen (we found out later) was that an infertile friend of ours conceived around the same time as us, but lost her pregnancy whilst ours continued along.

I found out recently that friend - who is still childless - had a second miscarriage earlier this year. The baby would have been due just before our current estimated date.