So, I just cancelled my place on a baby massage instructor training course. I thought it would be the ideal thing to compliment my work as a pregnancy massage therapist as I tend to gradually lose touch with my clients after the babies are born. I so enjoy meeting their babies for the first time, holding them when I have come to know them so well in the womb and connected with their phenomenal wise energy. But at the weekend I suddenly just thought about being faced with a whole room of new mums and dads and their little people and realised I could not do it. Yes, business-wise, it'd be great. But emotionally I think it would be a step too far.

Somehow, without realising, we've entered a new phase of waiting to become a family. Moving onto the boat heralded a new chapter and all the immense changes and challenges it threw up meant our attentions were focused elsewhere. We did not chat about fertility so much, my fertility vitamins ran out and I forgot to buy new ones, the acupuncture petered out....

And here is the strangest part; family and friends seem to have accepted our childless status. When my cousin's wife became pregnant, my dad told me without the usual quiet acknowledgment of our own emptiness. Friends on their second and third pregnancies are no longer careful what they say. Hey, I'm not saying I want everyone tiptoeing around me but it seems so odd that it's been completely forgotten. As if R and I had said some time back we didn't want kids or something.

And around us, friends and family become pregnant, give birth, have houses full of toddlers, birthday parties are celebrated, the years keep on ticking by....

I feel strange today because an old client got in touch as she's in her last trimester and wanted to book pregnancy massage up until the due date and I thought 'hang on, when did that happen?!' With those first pregnancies of friends and clients, I was right on hand, massaging, allaying fears, supporting, sharing birth books, cooking nourishing food for new mum, rocking babies etc etc. I would bake cakes and draw pictures to decorate the nurseries and now...well, these days it seems babies pop out of nowhere - I'll bump into a non-pregnant friend and ten minutes later I'll see her again and she'll be 6 months gone. Hmmmm, know this says more about my general reclusiveness than anything else. But today I feel sad and that's just how it is.