From the very earliest days of the beginning of our relationship, DH and I knew that we both wanted to have children. The whole topic of children and the conversation as to whether the other wants them or not is usually a key milestone in new relationships. When we met, I was one month short of 26 and DH was 29. I truly felt like he was "the one" and was even more smitten (if that was possible) when he told me, after we had both admitted on our first date in Dublin that we saw children in both of our futures, that we would make 'beautiful babies'. I remember I was sitting on a stone wall alongside Dublin Bay holding DH to me while he stood looking out at the sea. It was May 2001 and it was a beautiful clear blue sky day. We had been laughing about all the prams going by and he said "sure - there's always lots of babies about in Ireland". Women seemed to (and actually do) have their babies younger in Ireland than in Australia and I thought that was nice as I never fancied being an 'older' mother.
Our relationship grew and I decided to complete my studies in law in Dublin and try to qualify in Ireland and got a job at a local law firm. We realised that we wanted to be together and the greatest hurdle to the joining of our future lives seemed to be reconciling our differing citizenship. I went through a period of thinking I could never give up Australia for ever (forever seems so final) as DH made clear he was happily settled in Ireland and not for moving again (he had lived in USA and Italy) but gradually came around as I realised that your life is where your family and home is and that DH and I would soon make our own nuclear family in Dublin and that because of this, Dublin would become home.
I could not have known it at the time but my body and my unconscious must have known that something ominous was occurring within my ovaries - I was running out of time and they were shutting down.....failing. Closer to my 27th birthday I felt what is too often condescendingly referred to as my biological clock - tick tock tick tocking. I knew rationally that DH and I were not yet married, that I did not have job security (nor Irish residency for that matter), very little money and incomplete qualifications but I felt a distracting physical and emotional desire to be pregnant, to have a baby. I worried about terrifying him with my true thoughts but revealed them late one week night when we was particularly tired after a hard day's work. He said to me "what now?" I said "soon....". He took it pretty well but said he would prefer to wait a little. 2002 moved into 2003 and I abandoned responsibility for contraception and told him he was now in charge of that. We took a trip to Australia - DH's first for Christmas 2003. It was an important trip if only to confirm what I already knew - that I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. He gained the stamp of approval of all my friends (and their parents, after attending a best friend's wedding!) and family and importantly he saw where I was from and learnt about the real me - the core of me, after only knowing me in Dublin for the last 2.5 years. We were so in love (and still are). We returned from the heat and humidity of Brisbane and DH's introduction to my Australian world, to the cold of Dublin and conceived our first baby in January 2004.
