Becoming a mother isn’t always easy – Sobia Afridi’s journey took her from Oxford to a stairwell in Pakistan
Seeing my son Shariq, 16, in his black prom suit, I couldn’t resist asking for one more photo. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he said, embarrassed, as I aimed my phone. Although he towers over me, he’s still my baby. My feelings go beyond just being a proud mum – they are a reminder of our journey as a family to this moment, a journey that started in a poorly lit stairwell in Pakistan.
In 1992, when I was 22, my husband, Amjad, and I had an arranged marriage. From the start, I always wanted children – perhaps more than most because my mum died when I was 12, leaving an emptiness that could only be filled by having my own family. We started trying from day one, but it just wasn’t happening for us. In those days, there was a stigma in the Asian community around infertility. I remember a woman coming up to me at a wedding and asking, ‘Any good news?’
I shook my head. ‘Really? My sister got married six months after you and she’s already pregnant,’ she said. I went to the loos and cried. After that, I stopped going out because I just couldn’t face the questions.
After dozens of tests, a consultant diagnosed unexplained infertility and said our chances of having a baby were unlikely. Unexplained fertility is hard to process because if you know what’s wrong, you can fix it – or at least you have a reason why. When it’s unexplained, it’s like a piece of a jigsaw is missing.
We spent thousands of pounds on IVF. We used up all our savings and my father also gave us money. It was very gruelling, physically and emotionally. In the midst of this, my lovely neighbour popped round one day to tell me she was pregnant with her fourth child. I couldn’t let her in – it must have seemed rude, but I just couldn’t handle it.
I had six rounds of IVF on the trot, until the consultant said, ‘Your body can’t take much more of this.’ Around this time, my husband’s sister, who lives in Karachi in Pakistan, had adopted a beautiful baby girl. Seeing how happy she was, I thought we should look into adoption in the UK. We contacted social services in 2000.
When we were finally approved in 2003, I felt like I had won the lottery. In those days, adoption rules were very strict. You could only adopt children from the same ethnic background. Amjad and I are both Pakistani, and while there were lots of mixed-race children in the system, we were not eligible. Our social worker warned us that we could be waiting for anything from a year to five years.
New hope
My sister-in-law suggested the Edhi Foundation in Pakistan, which runs a cradle project where people can leave their unwanted babies, no
