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I no longer had doubts. I knew then that, more than anything, I wanted to be the mother of that soul floating around. Two months later I was in the doctor's clinic for an appointment, as I hadn't had a period since the miscarriage, so a D and C was scheduled.

"As part of the procedure, we'll do a pregnancy test first as a precaution." 

It was like they were rubbing the sadness in with salt, but I peed in the jar, the doc stuck the stick test in it, shook it, and left it aside on his desk. I started working through my written list of questions about the D and C; I wanted to be prepared. The doctor started to answer. On the third question, he looked up from his desk.

"Oh, congratulations! It seems you are pregnant."

"That's not funny...I know it's the 1st of April, but that's not funny."

"I assure you I am not joking; there is a very faint line if you look carefully at the test. See."

He handed me the stick. I stared at the faintest of blue lines showing. "It's probably just hormones left over from the miscarriage?"

"No, that is not how it works," he said, smiling.

My heart felt like it was growing bigger with every breath I took.

We moved into my family's little bungalow and got married that July, in the back garden as my parents had forty years previously. Izzy, the best April Fool's joke ever, was born the following December.

Speed forwards ten years. Ten very full years. Years of business drama, joy, and another miscarriage, followed by another much-wanted baby, this time a son. Travel; two houses; chaos; lots of chaos; addiction; business failure; chaos; despair; gut-wrenching sadness; suicide attempts; depression; chaos; struggle; calm. Ten years of absolute chaos, but also lots of moments of the extreme joy that having children brings.

Ronan's years of bachelorhood had him in the habit of drinking every evening, which gradually grew into not just every evening but every morning and every afternoon also. I thought moving from the pressure and chaos of the city would help, so we bought a nice house in the country. It didn't work.

My parents built a studio in the back garden, and Eileen, who had gone through years of an abusive marriage, left Assface and moved up the road from us.

She too found alcohol a comfort and an emotional crutch. Between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-four, I watched two of the people I loved most in the world being destroyed by alcohol. After a decade of chaos, Ronan gave up drink and never went back. Eileen's sobriety was more sporadic. She would be doing great, but Assface always knew how to push her buttons to bring her back down to despair.

Around the same time, the not-too-shabby career I had grown in print magazine publishing began looking unstable with the rise of the internet, so I started doing some freelance copy writing for a new wedding magazine. One of my first assignments, "The Top-10 Destination Wedding Locations," had me enthralled; Mauritius, Saint Lucia, New York, Spain, and Italy. I got to explore their luxury venues from my sofa, and after doing interviews with luxury venue managers in each city, they inevitably wrote in their final email: "Thank you so much for including us. Please do come stay a couple of nights as our guest to experience what we have to offer."

Of course, it wouldn't be practical to fly to Mauritius to stay two nights at one hotel, but an idea started to grow. Through the online wedding magazine, I opened an advice section to get ideas for articles based on couples' questions. The more I researched and wrote about weddings, the more I saw a pattern in the questions newly engaged couples had.

"How do I choose a venue without visiting a country?"

"What are the legal requirements for a church wedding in Italy?" 

"Can you help me find a venue within an hour of an airport in..."

I became obsessed. Destination-wedding research fed my love of travel research and logistical organizing. Within a couple of months I became the go-to person online for anything about destination weddings. Then someone asked, "What is your fee to plan our wedding in Malaga?"

I tentatively looked back on the contacts I had made in Spain and reached out to Dyana, an English wedding planner based there. "Sure, why don't you come over for a week. I'll arrange for you to stay at some venues so you can experience what is on offer. Bring your family and then I can be your on-the-ground planner here for any clients you get."

So, within two weeks, even though we hadn't taken a salary in three months from our struggling magazine business, I had booked cheap flights to Malaga for us and our twelve-and five-year-olds. We were picked up by a luxury car and whisked off to a five-star hotel, where we were greeted with drinks and the bell boy instantly called to bring us to our room, which we weren't told the number of at check-in.