Martina Devlin interview

Martina Devlin interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

If you want to make God laugh, make plans. Martina Devlin is a very old fashioned girl from the town of Omagh, in County Tyrone and Martina made what she thought were very reasonable plans. She planned to get married and have lots of children, like any nice girl would.   She came from a large, happy family, with seven children and she was an enthusiastic auntie to eleven nieces and nephews. It was expected that she would make a wonderful mother.
Like many women of her generation, Martina had emigrated to London, as soon as she left school. The plan was to study for a while, get a job and eventually make enough money to come home. Like a footprint in the sand, she felt that she was really a stranger in England and would look longingly at the Irish faces that she saw in the streets, wanting to be part of a tribe, wanting to feel a sense of belonging, wanting to put down roots in the place where she came from. And when she was in her early thirties, she decided that she was ready. She met a man who was also Irish and they decided to get married and have children, in the traditional manner.
So the couple moved back to Ireland, bought a house,- a four bedroomed house, so as to have room for the kids- and got married. They hadn’t been together long, but they had both wanted to start a family, so they didn’t waste any time trying for the first baby.
That’s when things started to go wrong. It turned out that Martina had twisted fallopian tubes, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to conceive naturally, but she did seem like an ideal candidate for IVF treatment. So she leapt in, convinced it was only a matter of time before the baby arrived.
“The doctor will say to you that you have a one in four chance of becoming pregnant, but the only word you will hear in that sentence is pregnant,” she says, wistfully.   “You are totally blinkered and you believe that you will be the lucky one. I was so filled with optimism that I hadn’t ever prepared for disappointment.”
Martina and her husband picked themselves up after the initial disappointment, and tried again. But the IVF treatment was to prove to be a nightmare of horrific proportions, one which would destroy their relationship and send Martina into the darkest hell that she had ever experienced, a place from which she feels lucky to have emerged at all.
“It’s hard to get across quite how it takes over your life. It’s PMS meets pregnancy, meets the menopause. You are a seething cauldron of hormones. It affects you emotionally, physically, spiritually, on all levels. It’s absolutely devastating when it doesn’t work. Your reactions are disbelief, rage, grief and you get through that and pick yourself up and try again. One of the risks is the possibility of carrying on endlessly with it, while your whole life is put on hold. After three IVF cycles, a voice inside me said “You are not going to survive a fourth cycle. You will either end up in John of Gods, or you will end up in the graveyard.’ I had to call a halt to it for my own sanity. Every time the eggs were implanted, I was choosing baby names, checking the baby’s star sign, deciding who would be the god-parents, I even had a christening robe. To me, those embryos were babies, I would beg them to hold on and we would have a wonderful life together.”
It has been a carefully considered decision to speak out about such a private matter. But there is too much at stake for other women, other couples, she says, not to.
‘I hear women say ‘I can always have fertility treatment.” And they sort out the career and the house and the man first and put the babies on the long finger. But it doesn’t work that way, as I discovered. I just want to say that fertility treatment isn’t the great panacea I thought it was. Medicine isn’t a fairy godmother that can wave a wand and make you get pregnant, and I think a lot of women believe that it is.”
Everybody thinks that they can have a child when they want to, as an entitlement, Martina says.
“The urge to reproduce is a very powerful one and what made failure particularly painful was that I felt that Nature had de-selected me, because I was fundamentally flawed.”
Her relationship collapsed under the strain of so much disappointment.
“Men are sidelined by the process. I think it’s very difficult for them. When my husband looked at me, he saw the grief and pain and misery and hopelessness of three failed IVF cycles and when I looked at him, I saw the same thing and it drove a wedge between us. It was nearly a relief for both of us to no longer be pursuing this doomed exercise.”
Martina lost not only her husband and her hope, but also her home, as well. Her husband wanted to keep it and she didn’t care, either way.
“I was incredibly vulnerable and filled with self-loathing and despair. I would have liked to have crawled into a dark corner and been allowed to die. Life seemed to have no purpose and I could see no light at the end of the tunnel.”
But Fate wouldn’t allow Martina to crawl away and die. Out of her darkness was born an entirely new kind of baby, her first novel.
“Because reality was so bleak, so sombre, I turned to fiction. I started writing in order to invent an imaginary world where I had some control over outcomes, because in real life I had no autonomy, or so it seemed. I came to realise that you need some shadow, to put the light in perspective. Without disappointment, it’s impossible to appreciate the joy that life occasionally throws at you. And seeing my novels published became a compensation. They are my babies.”
          “Venus Reborn”, Martina’s third novel is just about to hit the shelves and the first two, ‘Three Wise Men” and ‘Be Careful What You Wish For” were both best-sellers. Her latest novel features a woman who finds an abandoned baby and decided to keep it, even if it is illegal to do so. She will, she says, probably bang on about childless women until she gets it out of her system. And as a writer she taps into the pain of her own life’s experiences. She still wants a child, she says. A child who could be a prettier, cleverer, taller version of herself. Someone to love. But she will never again try for a baby.
          “ Three attempts, I think, was a fair go at trying to subvert what Fate had intended for me. I think it was my fate to be childless.   I used to puzzle over it, but I think the reason is so that I can write fiction. As an author, I’m interested in making sense of life through fiction. I don’t imagine I can change people’s lives with the fiction, but it certainly brings a great deal of consolation to me. And maybe if I had had a child, I wouldn’t be writing!”
          After having talked to Martina, I wander around town for a bit and I am struck by the number of women I see pushing prams. And by the number of toddlers that have appeared, out of nowhere. And I wonder how many of those mothers were really desperate to have children and how many of them simply found themselves pregnant and decided to go ahead with it. How many of them didn’t, perhaps, want children at all and found themselves resenting the children they gave birth to. And it occurred to me that making sense of life is really all about embracing whatever the situation is that we find ourselves in, and making the absolute best that we can, of it. And recognising that even if we don’t always see the whys and the wherefores, it is always possible that things have turned out for the best, the way it does in stories.