“It felt like we both knew it was time to begin to try to let go,” she says, but that in itself required a huge effort.
“I didn’t know at the point whether I was right. But we just began to tread forward,” she says.
She threw herself into work. She had started her business, selling biscuits stamped with personalised messages, during their second round of IVF.
At first if people said her business was her baby, she would bristle. These days she finds it comforting. After all, it is something she has nurtured for a decade.
She now has a team of 14 in the bakery, sends her biscuits all over the country, and has partnered with a mail order flower firm.
For Gareth letting go has meant rethinking his work altogether. He is about to start a new job as a greenkeeper at his golf club.
People do ask her if she considered adopting, but she says it “wasn’t the path that we chose.”
“Adoption isn’t just another way to become a parent. It’s a major decision.
A decade of IVF had changed Caroline’s relationship with her own body.
“I was focusing on this one thing it couldn’t do,” she says.
She started long distance running and instead of berating her body over its failure, she started celebrating what it could do instead. She has now done four half and full marathons, while Gareth is on his sixth.
“I love the life I’ve got.
“I don’t feel that direct sense of loss any more. It’s a different, a softer kind of sadness now.”
She has found a greater sense of peace as time passes. Even that comes though with pangs of guilt, wondering whether coming to terms with her childlessness, means she did not want it enough, or try hard enough.
She knows that’s still the “don’t give up” message, nagging at her conscience.
“We’re taught growing up that effort equals results, but it’s often not how it works.
“Life can still have meaning and it can still have purpose, even when it looks so drastically different from what you expected.”