‘She said she’d be babysitting our embryo’: What’s it like to carry a child for a friend?

Surrogacy between friends can be life-changing. The people who have done it talk emotions, legal hurdles – and WhatsApp birthing groups

In a flat in north-east London, Abi is cradling her best friend’s baby. At 15 weeks old, the little boy is smiling up at her, testing out his first sounds. His mother, Rachel, prepares his bottle while Abi rocks him, showing all the love she would to any of her friends’ children. The only difference is that Abi gave birth to him.

Abi and Rachel, both 35, met on their first day at university in Birmingham in 2003 and rarely left one another’s side. At 16, Rachel had been diagnosed with MRKH, a congenital condition meaning her uterus was undeveloped. 

Although she produced eggs, she would never be able to carry children, something she kept to herself. “I’d tell people I didn’t want kids but deep down I was insanely jealous,” says Rachel, who works as an events producer in London. “I wanted them so badly but assumed I’d never have my own, so I learned to live with it.”

After meeting her boyfriend, Sam, at a warehouse party on the eve of 2014, she avoided the “family” chat for two years before confiding in him. “We continued our relationship knowing kids may or may not happen,” she says.

A weekend stay at Abi’s home, in November 2017, bringing together five friends, their partners and kids, presented an opportunity to open up to them, too. Abi, a mother to three boys, remembers: “My partner, Rich, was cooking a curry, the kids were asleep and we were sitting around the kitchen table. Everyone spilled something personal. When Rachel told us about her condition, I knew, in my gut, that I would help her to have a child.”

Rachel and Sam had explored IVF, surrogacy and adoption, but had dismissed using agencies, which can be vastly oversubscribed, with waits of up to two years to find a match. “It felt too impersonal; too life-changing somehow,” she says. Her younger sister had yet to start her own family; had she already had children, Rachel might have asked her to be a surrogate.

Abi and Rich, meanwhile, “spent Christmas contemplating what being a surrogate would mean for everyone. We had been so lucky, yet one of the people I love most hadn’t,” she says. “I hate this phrase but it was a no-brainer.”

She called Rachel in the new year and told her to sit down before offering to carry her baby. Rachel remembers: “She said it would be like ‘babysitting’ our embryo and that term stuck. She’d made up her mind, and that blew me away. I hadn’t told my friends expecting one of them to be the answer. When Abi offered, it felt, for the first time, as if having a child was a very real possibility.”

***

In the UK, the number of children born by surrogate is up to 10 times higher than it was a decade ago, according to the Law Commission, which recently consulted on modernising the process to better support parents, surrogate and child. While US states such as California have commercialised the arrangement, with surrogates earning well in excess of $50,000 (£38,300), it is illegal to pay someone for acting as a surrogate in the UK, meaning the process relies on the altruism of strangers recruited through an agency, or loved ones. It is not routinely available on the NHS, and the private medical costs are typically up to £16,000. “Known” surrogacy – between friends or relatives – is still rare: at Care, the UK’s largest private fertility group, they accounted for 10% of more than 100 surrogacy cycles at their clinics last year.

‘I could hardly believe it was real’: Rachel (right) with her baby, for whom Abi was the surrogate mother. Photograph: Silvana Trevale/The Guardian

Surrogacy is a delicate arrangement with high stakes. Pregnancy and childbirth can be gruelling, and present health risks, while the unknown territory of handing over a baby you have carried – or parenting the child you have not – presents added fears over bonding or changes of heart, albeit rare.

When there is an existing friendship at the arrangement’s heart, the stakes can feel higher still, for both the surrogate carrying a longed-for child and parents asking such as sacrifice of someone they care for, typically with a family themselves to consider. (Medics and lawyers advise against surrogacy until women have completed their own families, citing concerns about reproductive health and fears that it would be harder for them to give up the baby.) Not surprisingly, the friendships that underpin these arrangements are life-changing.

Abi, Rachel and Sam embarked on medical appointments at a London fertility clinic. The friends were invited for counselling and asked to consider everything from how they would feel if Abi backed out, to how she would feel if she gave birth to a girl, after three sons. They set up a WhatsApp group. “We left Rich off that,” Abi says. “I’ll talk about body parts and womb washing till the cows come home but he saw his role as keeping things normal – remaining practical and pragmatic in a hyper-emotional situation.” They told their families, including Abi’s boys – four, three and nine months at the time. “We always talked about ‘Rachel and Sam’s baby’. We said, ‘Rachel’s womb doesn’t work but Mummy’s does, so we’re going to look after a baby for them.’”

In hindsight, living miles apart was good. If we were round the corner I’d have been posting steak through her letterbox

After initially being refused any NHS fertility treatment that would lead to surrogacy, Rachel successfully lobbied her local commissioning group for a single round of IVF, in May 2018, allowing her eggs to be extracted for fertilisation by Sam’s sperm, creating a viable embryo. It would later be placed in Abi’s uterus at a private clinic, using money Rachel’s parents had saved for her wedding. “Surrogacy is still seen as something you do if you’ve got money rather than through biological need,” Rachel says.

Abi was given oestrogen and progesterone, and the embryo was transferred, via catheter, in a simple, minutes-long procedure, on 2 October. “From that moment, it was out of my control,” Rachel says. “I felt like I was holding my breath.”

When Abi took a pregnancy test, at 7am on a Saturday morning nearly a fortnight later, Rachel and Sam were in bed, on the end of the phone. “When she sent through a picture of the positive test, we were in total shock; it was extremely emotional. We didn’t know how to get on with our day other than staring at that picture.” They remained in daily contact and Rachel travelled the 150 miles to Abi’s home for midwife appointments and scans, as well as attending antenatal classes, along with Rich. “In hindsight, the distance was a good thing,” Rachel says. “If we were round the corner, I’d have been posting steak through her letterbox.”

They had to consider how to announce the pregnancy. Rachel would say: “We’re expecting a baby, but I’m not pregnant. My friend is carrying our baby.” Abi, who works in public engagement at the BBC, recalls: “Everyone’s mouths dropped at work. My mum asked, ‘Why you?’ But they all thought it was amazing.”

When it came to maternity leave, Abi was entitled to a year, but took six weeks, while Rachel was entitled to a year’s adoption leave. Outdated surrogacy laws require that Abi’s name is on the birth certificate alongside Sam’s; had Abi and Rich been married, he would have been named as the father. They also recognise Abi as the mother until Rachel obtains the court order granting her legal parental status. Seven months on, she is still waiting. “The fact that on paper he’s still not my son is upsetting,” she says, “but I can’t dwell on it. It’s a process, so we treat it that way.”

Many surrogacy pairings put an agreement in place. Although not legally binding – it is illegal for solicitors to negotiate one – it helps mitigate against concerns over all aspects of the pregnancy, from supplements to who first holds the baby. Rachel and Abi decided against it. “If Abi had changed her mind on anything, we all would have,” Rachel says.

Surrogates can receive reasonable expenses, such as extra food, travel, childcare or housekeeping costs, and Rachel and Sam gave Abi a cash card. “It’s the trickiest part because no expenses can repay her,” Rachel says. “She was militant about not asking for too much, but I wanted her to have a meal on us because she had our son with her.”

The baby was born on 8 June 2019. Rachel and Sam drove Abi to the hospital and witnessed the birth. “I could hardly believe it was real,” says Rachel, who fainted as he was delivered into her arms. The couple spent the first two nights after his birth in hospital, down the corridor from Abi.

“Rich was working late and arrived to find us all in the room together and the baby just minutes old,” Abi says. “He stayed for the placenta delivery, had some tea and toast and went home to be there for our boys in the morning. I don’t think the scale of what we’ve done will hit us for a long time. I’m relieved at how normal it feels when I see the baby. Rachel was so generous with her trust in me.”

Rachel adds: “Abi put herself mentally and physically through the most selfless act for me, to make us a family. She gave up a huge part of her life during those months to change ours for ever. I couldn’t handle what I was putting her through at times but she’d always say: ‘You’re not putting me through this, I’ve chosen to do it.’ If I ever asked why, she would say: ‘Well, I can’t think why not.’”

***

As fertility medicine has advanced and different family units evolved, surrogacy has emerged as a more familiar route to parenthood, but demand far outweighs the number of women willing or able to volunteer, and the British legal system is playing catchup. London-based family lawyer Joanna Kay, who has advised on surrogacy for more than a decade, says: “The landscape of what a family looks like has changed beyond recognition, but the laws are from the mid-80s. Without a court order, intended parents can’t make decisions about their child’s medical care or education; there can be problems with passports and inheritance. I don’t think anyone would argue against the need for reform.

“In most cases, everyone knows what they’re signing up for and is happy to honour their agreement. On rare occasions things go wrong and the courts are asked to intervene. There have been a handful of cases where the surrogate didn’t want to hand over the baby or the intended parent didn’t want it.”

Other relationships between parents and surrogates have been deep and enduring. Kim Cotton, who became Britain’s first surrogate in 1985, went on to help her friend Linda, who was unable to carry children because of complications associated with a miscarriage; Cotton gave birth to twins in 1991. “The family moved to New Zealand when the twins were teenagers but I still track their lives, mostly through Facebook now,” says Cotton, who is 63, and the founder of the Cots surrogacy agency. “Christmases and birthdays are still special and the twins and I always send messages to mark them. My friendship with Linda remains the kind where you are for ever aware of that person and can pick up with them anytime, even if you don’t speak often.”

***

Yet even longed-for pregnancies don’t always run smoothly. After Laura was made infertile five years ago, at 28, by treatment for stage two cervical cancer, her best friend Kerrie represented her only hope of becoming a biological mother. Last year, Kerrie offered to carry Laura’s fertilised eggs, frozen before she began intensive chemo and radiotherapy five years ago.

They had been friends since childhood and shared everything, Laura says, over a cup of tea at Kerrie’s home in Lancashire. “Relationships, breakups, marriages, my illness; she cries with me and laughs with me,” she says.

In 2014, Laura, a nursery manager, and her now-husband Grant were about to start IVF for problems unconnected to her own fertility when a routine smear test detected cancerous cells. “They talked about a hysterectomy,” she remembers. “Knowing my illness would take away my chance of having children was what broke me, not the cancer.” By this point in the story, both women are in tears. “As we left the hospital, I told Grant to leave me,” Laura adds. He didn’t. And while a hysterectomy was ruled out, Laura spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve undergoing treatment, with Kerrie by her side. She had delayed it by one month, so her eggs could be extracted and later used to try for a child via surrogate.

In April 2015, a scan revealed the tumour had gone. When Grant and Laura married in Cyprus in 2016, Kerrie was a bridesmaid. “When I was ill, a few friends had offered to be a surrogate,” Laura says. “And when we finally came round to thinking about it, two years ago, it was Grant who said: ‘It has to be Kerrie.’”

Kerrie, 33 and a hairdresser, had a similar conversation with her husband, Danny. “At the clinic, he told us he knew when Laura became ill that I would do it one day. I’d had two good pregnancies and it would only be nine months of my life to improve hers for ever. I focused on seeing them with a child.”

Although it was NHS-funded IVF that had led to the discovery of Laura’s cancer, when surrogacy became her only option, the funding was withdrawn. 

“I didn’t let it go without a fight,” she says. “Ultimately they were taking it away because I had cancer. The NHS saved my life; to then dictate that life isn’t fair.”

In the end Laura’s family paid for her treatment. “They would have helped me with a house deposit but I said, no, give me a baby, please.” The surrogacy was delayed when Kerrie unexpectedly became pregnant with her third child in 2018, but in October 2019 Laura’s eggs were thawed. Eight had been fertilised – but only one looked viable for transfer and pregnancy. It was placed in Kerrie’s womb on 7 October. The women held hands as they sat on the clinic’s bed. “When they told us there was only one chance, I couldn’t look at Laura,” Kerrie says. “She can read my thoughts. I wanted to stay positive for her but the pressure was huge.”

I’d been carrying her most treasured possession. We were numb. We drove home in silence

On 23 October, two clear lines showed on the pregnancy stick, but Kerrie tested and retested, with Laura by her side, to be sure. Both women were ecstatic. However, on 1 November Kerrie started bleeding. A miscarriage, at five weeks, was confirmed two days later at hospital.

She gave me my only chance of being a biological mum,’ says Laura (left) of Kerrie. Photograph: Shaw & Shaw/The Guardian

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Kerrie says. “I’d been carrying her most treasured possession. We were numb. We drove home in silence. My priority was being strong for her but I was broken. We went from speaking all day, every day, to nothing for 48 hours. I’d type a message asking, ‘Are you OK?’ then delete it. When we eventually sat down together, we cried our hearts out. I felt responsible but I knew I’d done everything I could.”

Laura is still coming to terms with her grief. “I was uncontrollable, heartbroken. We each had our own grieving to do; it wasn’t that we didn’t want to speak, we just didn’t have the words and didn’t want to add to each other’s pain.”

Kerrie has offered to be a surrogate again, with a donor egg, but Laura says she couldn’t put her friend through it. She has also thought about adoption but needs time to heal before giving it serious consideration.

“I don’t think anybody realises how difficult the process is,” she says. “Kerrie gave me my only chance of being a biological mum. I didn’t know I could love her any more than I already did.”

***

Despite the spike in surrogacies over the past decade – and a rise in profile following the examples of celebrities Kim Kardashian, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker and Tom Daley – just 302 (0.4%) of 75,425 fertility treatment cycles recorded by UK watchdog the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 2017 were surrogacies. But it has become a viable route for gay men who want to start a family. At Care, two-thirds of surrogacies in 2018/19 were for men in same-sex relationships, an option aided by the HFEA’s 2011 decision to offer £750 compensation to egg donors, triggering more women to help others on their parenthood journeys. This, says consultant gynaecologist David Polson, “opened up the options for same-sex couples to seek out a surrogate and become parents”. Advances in freezing fertilised eggs have also made it more likely that a thawed embryo will be suitable for transfer to another woman’s womb.

In Kent, Kevin, 45, a chief marketing officer, and Spencer, 30, a solicitor, are getting their six-month-old son ready for bed when the other half of “Sawyer’s birthing squad” (the name they gave their pregnancy WhatsApp group) arrives: surrogate Leanne, 36, and her sister Rachael, 33, Sawyer’s egg donor. “There’s not many teams like us out there,” says Leanne, grabbing a bedtime cuddle.

Spencer and Kevin have been together 10 years and married in 2015. “I told Kevin on our first date that I needed to be a dad,” Spencer says. “The biological connection was important to us. We wanted to be involved from the start.” They explored agencies but the networking aspect turned them off. “It was like speed dating. There were more couples than surrogates. It felt hard to be your true self.” They spoke to relatives and asked close friends but none provided an obvious solution. So, despite reservations, they turned to an agency and invested five months getting to know a potential surrogate, only to be let down by an early morning text weeks before treatment was due to start.

The one thing they did have was an egg donor. (Medics typically discourage having the same woman perform both functions, to offset concerns around the possibility of bonding too strongly with the baby.) Spencer and Rachael, a credit controller, had become friends two years earlier after meeting on an IVF forum on Facebook. Rachael, then pregnant with her third child, was exploring egg donation, and Spencer wanted to know more about surrogacy. They lived nearby and began meeting up, forming a close friendship that involved weekends together, takeaways, dinners and days out. Spencer and Kevin became unofficial uncles to Rachael’s youngest son and joined in family celebrations, which is how they grew close to Leanne, a mental health support worker who had three sons of her own.

Leanne remembers: “Kevin and Spencer were lovely, and I’d seen how close they all were and how badly the boys wanted to be parents. When Rachael told me their surrogate had let them down, I instinctively offered.”

The group drew up a 12-page “intention agreement”, detailing expenses, medical tests, pregnancy supplements and protection – including life and critical illness insurance – for Leanne’s children in the event that anything went wrong. Kevin and Spencer spent £25,000: £6,000 for the cost of Rachael’s egg donation; £6,500 on medical appointments, screening tests (for all four), medication and scans; £2,500 to transfer their embryo to Leanne’s womb; and £10,000 on surrogate expenses. On pregnancy test day, they sat around Leanne’s kitchen table together, dipping the stick in a cup she’d wee’d in.

“This was the next best thing to carrying the baby ourselves,” Spencer says. “We were so involved. Friendship-first gave us trust and openness.” The expectant dads attended scans, sent hampers each trimester – the first contained ginger biscuits and tea for morning sickness – and downloaded an app that allowed them to read bedtime stories for Leanne to play to her belly. 

When her waters broke three months early, at 28 weeks, the responsibility weighed heavily for all. Leanne says, “You don’t want to let anything go wrong. Decisions about what happened next were theirs to make. I felt guilty.” The men felt responsible, too. “Leanne has three children; she had to go home perfect at the end of this,” Spencer says.

Some nurses called Leanne ‘Mum’ which none of us wanted. It felt antiquated

‘There’s not many teams like us out there’: Rachael (left), egg donor, and her sister Leanne (right), surrogate for Kevin (left) and Spencer. Photograph: Silvana Trevale/The Guardian

Leanne was monitored as an outpatient until labour started a month later. When Sawyer arrived, at 2.36am on 6 April, eight weeks premature and weighing 5lb, all four were in the room, Rachael as birthing partner. Sawyer spent 16 days in neonatal intensive care. His fathers stayed by his side but the now familiar outdated legalities meant Leanne had to return for his discharge.

Even once they have left hospital, it is common for surrogates to be contacted by health professionals seeking consent for newborn checks, despite parents being present. Kevin remembers: “Before the birth, our consultant emailed ahead to enforce our right to be there. Some nurses called Leanne ‘Mum’ which none of us wanted. It felt antiquated. I think it’s sexuality and gender more than surrogacy. It took us being by his side for 16 days to prove ourselves, and it shouldn’t be that way.”

After the birth, Leanne was flooded with emotion: “Your body doesn’t know you’re a surrogate; he was premature and my natural instinct was to know he was all right. I talked a lot with Rachael to be sure what I was feeling was OK. The openness and honesty between me and the boys was vital. Once home, I was back to being Leanne again.”

She expressed and froze milk for Sawyer for two weeks before returning to work. Going home from hospital, Kevin and Spencer stopped at her house, “to give her boys the first cuddle,” Spencer says. “They’d been through a lot, too.”

When the friends share their story with others, it is the egg donation that tends to generate the most interest, Kevin says, but for Rachael it represented nothing more than a tiny piece of DNA. “It’s that black and white for me,” she says. “My own children are the ones I’ve created with my husband. The way Kevin and Spencer look at Sawyer is the exact reason I wanted to do this.”

They see each other often and last month shared a Christmas outing and an early New Year’s Eve celebration before Sawyer’s bedtime. “I want our son to know who the two most incredible women on the planet are,” Kevin says. 

“They’ll for ever have that bond with him. The more love he has, the better.”

Back in north-east London, Rachel and Abi echo the sentiment. As the baby goes down for his nap, the friends leaf through a photo book of their pregnancy, created for their children. “I can’t wait for my son to know how many people brought him into the world,” Rachel says. “It’s the biggest act of kindness imaginable; I can never thank her enough.”

Abi smiles. “But you don’t need to thank me,” she says, “because it just feels entirely normal. We were going to be friends for the rest of our lives anyway; it’s just cemented our bond.”

(Source: The Guardian)

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won't speak to another human until Monday’

For growing numbers of people the weekend is an emotional wilderness where interaction is minimal and social life non-existent. What can be done to break this toxic cycle?

On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix. And in all those hours, in common with many of Peter’s Saturdays, not to mention his Sundays, he had no meaningful interaction with another human being. “The only person I spoke to,” he says, “was the lady who came over to verify my bottles of beer at the supermarket self-checkout.”

During the week, Peter, 62, is too busy to be lonely. His commute from Brighton to London means that his working life is “a tunnel” he enters on a Monday and from which no daylight is glimpsed until Friday. But just when Peter re-emerges, he is stymied by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. 

Instead of providing respite from the stress of office life, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, the weekend looms as a vast emotional and social wilderness that must be traversed before work takes hold again.

‘I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It’s a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned.’ Illustration: Monika Jurczyk/The Guardian

Peter dreads the weekend. But he is far from alone in this. He is one of nearly 200 respondents, from Falmouth to Jakarta, who replied to a request on the Guardian’s website for readers to share their experience of weekend loneliness. The youngest respondent was 16; the eldest in her 70s, and between them, the pain and isolation recurred in countless iterations.

Despite all this, the phenomenon of weekend loneliness has scarcely been studied. “It’s not something that’s been researched at all,” says Pamela Qualter, professor of psychology for education at the University of Manchester. She led the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment last year, and “found that there didn’t seem to be a time of day [nor] a season when people felt especially lonely. But we didn’t ask about the weekend.” So what does weekend loneliness look like, who experiences it – and what might be done to alleviate it?

“We define loneliness as the difference between the desire or expectation of what life should be like, and the reality,” says Kellie Payne, research and policy manager at the Campaign to End Loneliness. For those who experience loneliness primarily – or only – at the weekend, this painful discrepancy is intensified by the sense of being at odds not only with the world outside the door, but with one’s capable, sociable weekday self.

A personal, internal division emerges. Liz is 41, with a rewarding job and family nearby – but she is living two lives. “In the week, I am a contented, fulfilled person. At the weekend, I feel like a lonely outcast,” she says. Increasingly, she finds herself out of step with her social group where she lives in Somerset. 

She runs her own training business from home, so weekdays are busy. But this is exactly when her married friends want to meet for coffee “and a moan about their husbands”.

Liz would like to see these friends at the weekend, too, but when Saturday comes, “it’s unsaid – but it’s like they’ve closed the doors to me. Weekends are for couples. It would be unheard of to invite me to a dinner party, because I’m single,” she says. “I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It’s a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned.” When Monday dawns, “it is always a relief”.

For Liz, the loneliness of the weekend is exacerbated by an additional, painful sense that she is not only alone but locked out – “banned from the weekend”, as she puts it. Between Monday and Friday, she enjoys her neighbourhood, but at the weekend, the streets and parks seem to transform. They become questioning, forbidding, to the extent that Liz wonders if she has “absorbed” her loneliness from her environment, now full of couples, families, groups.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’ll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week,” she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. “I don’t feel conscious at all during the week” – but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

“As psychologists we talk about the looking-glass self,” Qualter says. “How your feelings about yourself are influenced by how you think others see you. The public space changes, becomes occupied by other people … It’s no longer your space. You feel uncomfortable because you don’t fit.”

“I hear this a lot,” says Sally Brown, a life coach and counsellor. “It’s like people have two personas. The weekday persona is busy and confident. But the weekend persona is lost and vulnerable.”

But is Liz really projecting her loneliness on to others, and imagining the way they see her – or does society read people who are alone in too predictable a manner? Peter believes he passes through his Brighton weekends undisturbed because he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. “The bachelor is something of a social misfit, but an acceptable one,” he remarks.

A person who enters a public space alone will often be read as best left alone. Mark is 32 and recently returned to London after a couple of years travelling. Going to the pub to watch football one weekend, he took a seat at an empty table for six. Quickly the pub filled. But Mark sat alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes before anyone asked if they could take one of the five free seats around him. “I guess they think you are going to be bringing extra people, or you’re weird,” he says wryly.

Brown, who sees many clients in their 30s and 40s, thinks this disconnect is “related to those transitional times when your peer group may have moved on to a stage you haven’t yet reached”. And, of course, may not wish to reach. Mark’s friends, like Liz’s, are mostly in relationships. “It can happen really fast. 

All of a sudden, your group isn’t there any more. You are second-tier friendship, relegated to week nights. You’re not in the couples’ dinner party or playdate scene. You start to lack confidence in connecting, so hesitate to suggest things. You assume you are not welcome at the weekend and withdraw … It becomes a toxic circle.”

Brown’s belief that loneliness at the weekend arises out of life’s transitions resonates with Kate. At 61, hers is a different kind of shift to Mark’s or Liz’s. Kate sees herself moving “from motherhood to single life again”. She uses the word “transition”, especially when she reminds herself, while she sits alone on Saturday nights, that she has raised her girls well, that the loneliness is just another challenge to overcome.

Kate, who lives in Cardiff, has two grown daughters whom she raised alone. Her weeks are busy with work and friends, and sometimes her children, if they happen to be nearby. But her weekends, like Peter’s, are “very long and quiet … I will not use my voice or speak with another human until Monday.”

For Kate, the silence of the weekend is wrapped in another sort of silence. She cannot speak of her loneliness to anyone, least of all her children.

“They would be devastated,” she says. “In a way, promoting their education, encouraging them to be social and confident … That has been to the detriment of me. The more they achieve, the further from home they have moved. But I wouldn’t change it, because it was my duty as a mother.”

Seven times during the course of an hour-and-a-half’s conversation, Kate worries that sharing her loneliness with her children would “burden” them. The word feels heavier each time it lands.

While silence protects her daughters, and preserves their sense of Kate, and Kate’s sense of herself, as “strong and capable, someone they can talk to”, it compounds her remoteness. Although she exchanges WhatsApp messages with both children every weekend, these seem to make no impact on Kate’s underlying isolation.

She has a “wonderful relationship” with both daughters, but their closeness makes the pain worse – because how can they not see?

I wonder if Kate’s daughters ever ask her what she did at the weekend, and Kate says she has been wondering about this, too. They don’t. “At some level – not consciously – they are worried about the answer.” In the meantime, her children’s absence weighs “like a bereavement” and the loneliness hits hardest at certain predictable moments.

Just as Peter sits down to his adventurous dinner, picks up his cutlery and feels instantly lonely – despite his efforts in the kitchen – so Kate reels from her plate.

She is at the opposite end of the culinary spectrum to Peter. “One of my favourite go-to meals is a couple of boiled eggs and a piece of toast,” she says. It’s a classic comfort meal that Kate routinely enjoys. But last weekend, she sat down, cracked open the egg, “and I thought: ‘I can’t do it.’ I have had that meal so many times, I just couldn’t eat it.” She threw the food into the bin.

Kate is approaching retirement. “But the idea of being retired is horrific – because all the days will be like weekends.” So what can she, or anyone, do to try to stem their weekend loneliness?

Sarah, who is 44 and lives in Surrey, asks herself this very question. “What can you do to alleviate your loneliness? We’re all struggling. Everyone I know has less money to spend.” She, too, is a single parent; and as her daughter, 18, becomes more independent, Sarah feels increasingly lonely at weekends. “What exacerbates the loneliness is that I’m a very sociable person,” she says.

To counter this, she keeps herself in a state of perpetual readiness for last-minute invitations. “It’s good to be seen as someone who will say yes – because you get asked again. I’ve been very lucky to be an emergency plus-one in quite a few situations,” Sarah says. She is aware that this won’t sound lucky to everyone.

She has filled in for her best friend on a trip with her friend’s husband to Secret Cinema. And she has made up the numbers at a wedding. “There is a kind of currency to being a couple,” she says. “That’s the word I want to use – a currency that makes couples worth more in social situations.” (Conversely, of course, the cost of living is lower for them, too.) So does being available at the last minute represent a kind of personal devaluation?

“I think that’s fair to say,” she says. “I’d much rather be turning up with someone. But I really appreciate it when I’m included. I love it. I think it’s important to be the person who says: ‘Yes, sure, I can sit next to whoever.’”

‘The idea of being retired is horrific – then all days will be like weekends.’ Illustration: Monika Jurczyk/The Guardian

Sarah and I are speaking on a Saturday afternoon. If she were not talking to me, she says, she would be writing an email or doing housework. She has a natural positivity and a bright voice that belie the sadness she feels on her most solitary weekends. If her daughter goes to university next year, the weekends, and weekdays, will further quieten. Like Kate and Peter, Sarah is conscious of the life change that looms.

So she is quietly hatching plans – to move, maybe, depending on her daughter’s movements. And in the meantime, she offers to babysit for friends, hopes for a leisure revolution for single people, and says yes to as many invitations as possible.

“It comes down to keeping the communication lines open, and initiating,” Brown, the life coach, says. Some of her clients have resolved their divided lives by adding structure to their weekends. Loneliness creates passivity in friendships, Brown warns. “There is a sense of ‘I can’t make this happen … It has got to happen to me’”, which can make people who are lonely less inclined to make an effort.

With some clients, Brown has mapped on paper their social circles and groups. “It’s amazing how many people they come up with.” Others’ “proactive approach” include cultivating regular haunts (because being among fellow regulars can feel a bit like being among friends) and attending groups or clubs through the website Meetup.

“That journey can involve some extra loneliness if you find a group you don’t fit with,” Brown warns. I think of Peter, who dropped out of a walking group after a woman berated him for describing himself as “a sad old bachelor”. (“You mustn’t say that,” she told him. “You must say you’re alone and happy.”) Or Kate, waiting for her children to ask what she did at the weekend. Or Mark, who sometimes finds Meetups “a group of lonely, desperate guys”.

“It’s about keeping going,” Brown advises. “If after two weeks you’re not connecting, move on.” Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

Peter, for instance, used to volunteer, but, he says, “it cut into what little weekend time I had”, which makes me suspect that as well as hankering for connection, he also cherishes his time alone. “People talk about the difference between being alone and being lonely,” he says. “I am slap bang in the middle of that.”

Meanwhile, Kate is thinking of fostering children. When Peter retires, he might travel the UK and explore a new culinary continent: veganism. Liz has been broadening her group of friends, “meeting new people who aren’t so stuck in the couple thing”. Mark is considering a move to a livelier part of London. And Sarah reminds herself, on her loneliest Saturday evenings, when no last-minute invitations materialise, “to look at all the positives. It’s really hard, but try to embrace the aloneness, the solitude.”

Some names and personal details have been changed.

(Source: The Guardian)

Free period products to be available in schools and colleges in England

State scheme starts from Monday as part of government bid to tackle ‘period poverty’

Tampons, sanitary pads and other period products will be made freely available to all state schools and colleges in England starting next week, with the launch of a scheme funded by the Department for Education.

The DfE scheme follows the government’s commitment last year to pay for sanitary products for primary and secondary schools, in an effort to tackle “period poverty”, which can cause girls from low-income families to miss school.

“We know that it is not easy for everyone to access period products where and when they need them. This scheme will deal with those problems so young people can go about their daily lives without getting caught out,” said Michelle Donelan, the children and families minister.

The scheme will apply to 20,000 primary and secondary schools, and colleges. Photograph: lovethephoto/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

The DfE said the scheme was designed “to give pupils easy access to period products at school or college” as well as breaking down stigmas and raising awareness around menstruation.

Amika George, the founder of Free Periods who began campaigning to end period poverty in 2017, said: “We ask that schools have open conversations with students about what they need and start signing up to the scheme – no child must miss out.

“Free products in schools will ensure that every child can learn and be their very best, without periods holding them back.”

A recent survey found that 42% of 14- to 21-year-olds in the UK said they had used makeshift sanitary protection, with some saying they had used socks, other fabric or paper as emergency replacements.

Rosamund McNeil, the assistant general secretary of the National Education Union, said more than 137,000 pupils missed school in 2018 because of their period. “No girl in the UK should miss out on education because they can’t afford these essential products,” McNeil said.

The scheme is to cost up to £20m this year for an estimated 1.7 million students. From Monday, staff will be able to order products from a commercial supplier, PHS group, awarded the contract by the DfE after a tender last year.

The range available to more than 20,000 schools and colleges includes environmentally friendly pads and reusable products, the company said.

The government initially pledged to provide sanitary products to all state secondary schools and colleges in last year’s spring statement. But the coverage was extended after campaigners pointed out menstruation began for many girls during their time at primary school.

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, applauded the government’s effort to extend provision to all schools.

“We’d urge the government to monitor the new scheme closely, so that if take-up numbers are low initially, then more can be done to advertise the service and to guarantee that every pupil can access a period product that meets their needs,” Whiteman said.

The scheme in England follows a groundbreaking 2018 decision by the Scottish government to fund free menstrual products to young people in schools, colleges and universities across Scotland, after a survey found that one in four struggled to obtain tampons or pads.

The Welsh government followed last year, offering free products to all state schools and colleges. NHS England also announced that women and girls in hospital would receive free sanitary products on request.

(Source: The Guardian)

Acclaimed scientist gets brain surgery for alcohol addiction

Microbiologist Frank Plummer has been on the frontlines of the battle against of some of the world's most alarming epidemics, from HIV to Ebola - but his illustrious career masked a growing reliance on alcohol. Now, the researcher has become the guinea pig in a clinical trial investigating whether brain implants can help treat alcohol use disorder.

Alcohol was always a big part of Frank Plummer's life.

At the beginning of his research career, in the early 1980s in Nairobi, he began to lean on scotch to relax, and to the handle stress, disappointment and grief related to his work.

Microbiologist Frank Plummer is recognised globally for his research into the HIV virus

He and his colleagues were feeling the visceral urgency of their work as they watched the African HIV crisis unfold.

"I felt just like a fire fighter or something but the fire didn't go out," Dr Plummer, 67, told the BBC.

"It just kept going and going and going. There was this sense that you needed to do something and that the world needed to do something. And I was trying to draw attention to it and get money to continue our work. So it was a time of intense pressure."

Dr Plummer's research subjects were Kenyan women, sex workers, some who were found to have a natural immunity to the virus.

It was pioneering research, and over the 17 years Dr Plummer spent in Kenya, he and his colleagues made groundbreaking discoveries made about how HIV spreads - breakthroughs that have helped inform how we reduce transmission risk and that raised the possibility a vaccine against the virus could be developed one day.

In those stressful times, five or six glasses of scotch a night were giving him room to exhale after hectic days and weeks.

When he returned to Canada, he took a leadership position at Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory, one of a handful of laboratories in the world with the capacity to work with highly pathogenic viruses like Ebola.

The University of Manitoba and the University of Nairobi have long collaborated on HIV research

At the lab they dealt with the outbreaks of Sars in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza in 2009. It was there Dr Plummer contributed to the development of Canada's Ebola vaccine.

It was vital, exciting, and stressful work, with 12-hour days that began with coffee and would end with several glasses of scotch. His drinking escalated to about 20 ounces of the booze a night.

It didn't seem to affect his work - until 2012, when it caught up with him.

"My liver packed it in," he says. "Before that I knew I drank a lot but I didn't think I had a problem."

The diagnosis of chronic liver failure was followed by a liver transplant. He had to watch his alcohol intake to preserve his new liver - but he found his alcohol had become a powerful thirst.

Dr Plummer tried treatment - rehab programmes, support groups, counselling, medications - but any relief was temporary. He would inevitably slip back into drinking.

"It was pretty hopeless cycle and it was very tough on my family and my wife, Jo, and on my children and my stepchildren," he says. "I was in the hospital a lot, I almost died several times."

He went looking for help - "a more robust clinical solution, perhaps one not yet discovered" - and was referred to two neurosurgeons at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital.

Frank Plummer was awake during the surgery

They were recruiting patients for an experimental procedure being conducted in North America for the first time, using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to help patients with treatment-resistant alcohol use disorder. The surgical trial is testing how safe and effective DBS is for alcohol addiction.

DBS has been used for over 25 years to help treat movement disorders like Parkinson's disease. Roughly 200,000 DBS surgeries have been performed around the world, many for the nervous system disorder.

In recent years, it's been explored as a treatment for a range of other diseases. At Sunnybrook, clinical trials are underway exploring DBS for use in disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, and alcohol use disorder.

What changes is the part of the brain being targeted, says Dr Nir Lipsman, the trial lead investigator and the neurosurgeon who performed Dr Plummer's surgery.

"[For] things like Parkinson's disease we target motor circuits in the brain, in addiction, alcohol use disorder, we're targeting reward, pleasure circuits of the brain," he says.

The DBS surgery performed on Frank Plummer targets the brain's nucleus accumbens, or pleasure centre

DBS treatment involves implanting an electrical device directly into a patient's brain to stimulate circuits where there is abnormal activity , or dysfunctional "wiring", and help reset them. DBS is frequently described as a type of "pacemaker" for the brain.

Electrodes are inserted into a targeted region of the brain to recalibrate activity in that area using electrical impulses - controlled by a pacemaker-like device placed under the skin of the patient's chest - and ease cravings.

Dr Plummer was the trial's first patient and underwent the experimental surgery just over a year ago. A total of six people are expected to eventually participate - all with a history of chronic alcohol use disorder proven resistant to other types of treatment.

Patients are awake for the surgery.

Dr Plummer says the worst part of the procedure were the noise and vibrations when surgeons drilled into his skull in order to implant the electrodes.

"It was a large drill that drills about a 25 cent piece out of your skull on both sides - that wasn't painful but it was annoying," he says.

Frank Plummer, seen with his wife Jo, says he has rediscovered life since the surgery

The brain pleasure centres being targeted in this study - the nucleus accumbens - is also involved in mood, anxiety and depression.

That factor is potentially key since many addiction disorders frequently coexist with mood disorders, the neurosurgeon says.

The surgeon says Dr Plummer has seen an improvement in both his cravings and his mood.

In those who've had the surgery, "we are seeing some signs, some early signs that we are having an impact on those kind of behaviours and those kind of measures that we want to influence", says Dr Lipsman.

The surgeons hope the study will shift some of the stigma around addiction disorders. Addictions are still often seen as a weakness or a failure of willpower, which can prevent people seeking treatment.

"We need to change the way we view addiction, change the way we view alcohol use disorder as a condition in its advanced stages, in the treatment resistant stages as being driven by circuits in the brain that are not functioning properly," he says.

But he cautions the research is in early stages - and that it's not a silver bullet.

"It's not just put in the implant, say goodbye and you're done," he says. Patients should still continue their conventional treatment for their alcohol addictions, like therapy or rehab programmes.

"It's really about viewing this as part of a larger strategy to treat what is an incredibly complex and challenging condition."

Any results from DBS are not instantaneous - it can take weeks to feel a change. For Dr Plummer, after a little while, "life just became so much better, so much richer."

"I suddenly decided that I wanted to write a book about my experiences as a scientist, and experiences living in Kenya," he says.

He's back to getting up early, writes daily and has returned to HIV research with the hopes of developing a vaccine for the disease.

He drinks occasionally but says he doesn't have the same compulsion or the physical dependency as before.

"Life is on the table again," he says.

(Source: BBC)