Author(s): Sinead Moriarty

Fiction.

Hello, I'm Emma. I used to be a normal, happy, level-headed person. I had a great husband, lovely friends, a job I enjoyed and a very lively social life - until I decided to have a baby and turned into Kathy Bates in Misery. TicktockticktockTICKTOCK . . . That's Emma Hamilton's biological clock you can hear. She wants a baby and she wants one NOW. But when Mother Nature refuses to play ball, Emma decides to give her a prod - or two. Soon her life is a roller-coaster of post-sex handstrands (you can't argue with gravity), hormone-inducing (sanity-reducing) drugs and a veritable army of probing specialists (torturers, more like). It's out with the booze and spontaneous sex, in with green tee and ovulation tests. Emma couldn't have conceived that the road to pregnancy would turn into the mother of all journeys. But she's finding out that once you're on the baby trail, nothing is sacred - and one way or another, life will never be the same again . . .