On 29 December 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x’ I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway. Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape. It was the time of waiting – for the next thing to happen, for the promised excitement of New Year’s Eve and snogging underneath leftover mistletoe. So it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar and punctuation.

There was just one thing.

I wasn’t a mother.

Not yet.

Because I was also waiting, suspended in silvery threads of an ambiguous hope. Three days previously, my husband, Justin, and I had flown to Los Angeles for our latest round of fertility treatment. This time, we had opted to try for pregnancy using an egg donor. We’d had the embryo transferred the morning after our plane landed.

I’d had a totally sober festive season until that point, sipping non-alcoholic wine to accompany the Christmas roast. My cocktails had been a carefully calibrated combination of oestrogen and progesterone rather than the kind I generally preferred, which were served in ice-cold martini glasses with extra brine.

Justin and I hadn’t chosen for this to be our Christmas, but when you go through fertility treatment, you realise that timing as it exists for other people is beyond your control. You are at the mercy of hormonal fluctuations, the thickness (or otherwise) of your uterine lining and the inconsistent vagaries of menstrual cycles.

And so, in the grip of existential uncertainty, I had begun exploring a different kind of logic – one that existed outside the parameters of rationality. I had started looking for signs. Call it superstition, spirituality or plain old stupidity, but I saluted pairs of magpies and took care not to walk under ladders. I went to a shaman in south London who performed rituals with feathers and pieces of rock. I wrote a letter to my future child. I tried to meditate and manifest and think positive and talk in a healthy way to my own body. I saw meaning in everything – a dream, a floating feather, a robin redbreast who turned up in the garden one unseasonably warm day in July. All of this, I told myself, was sent to tell me something. The universe was signalling that I was destined to have a child.

At some level, I realised this was unhinged. I understood that, in the sea of my own sadness, I had latched on to any passing piece of driftwood to keep afloat. In a precarious world, certainty – just like hope – is an addictive placebo.

On I clung. I told myself that receiving that text calling me “mum” was the surest sign yet that I was on the right path. I recalled listening to a podcast that claimed successful manifestation relied on acting as though you already possessed what you most desired. This was a test, I realised. I had to demonstrate that I was capable of maternal love.

So I replied with extra care and kindness to that unknown texter using their friend’s WhatsApp number. I said they’d got the wrong person but I hoped everything would be sorted out.

As I returned my phone to my pocket, I thought back to the preceding years of unsuccessful fertility treatment and recurrent miscarriage. I thought of the slow-motion grief they had caused me; the belief that I would never be fulfilled unless I had a baby. I thought of the difficult decision Justin and I had taken to pursue egg donation. I thought of the embryo now nesting inside me. And I thought: it was all meant to be. It led us here.

This would turn out to be true, but not in the way I had anticipated. Because it would be a psychic, rather than a baby, who would change my life for ever.

***

I’d spent the previous 12 years failing to have babies. During my first marriage, I’d had two unsuccessful rounds of IVF followed by a “natural” pregnancy, which I lost at three months. I was in hospital for that miscarriage and can still recall seeing the blotted, bloodied remains of my much-longed-for child in a kidney-shaped cardboard tray the nurses had given me.

Some months later, that marriage ended in the throes of a peculiar sadness: simultaneous grief for what was, for what might have been, and for what had never existed. I thought I was dealing with it but, in truth, I was numb. There seemed to be no way of communicating the magnitude of the loss. Not back then, anyway, when miscarriage and infertility were still barely talked about. A loved one advised me to treat it like a heavy period. Another questioned why I’d told anyone I was pregnant before the three-month mark, as if not speaking about it would have made it less real.

And so, like many women who experience misplaced shame, I readily set about internalising the failure as my own. The doctors told me my infertility was “unexplained” – a diagnosis so blank that I could quite easily shade it with my own self-loathing. It was, I determined, all my fault.

In my late 30s, I did a cycle of egg freezing at a different clinic. Once again, I was told my results were disappointing: two eggs, where most women my age could have expected about 15. By the time I met Justin, I was 39 and he was 43, with three children from a previous relationship. I decided I would try to be happy without a baby of my own. But then we got pregnant naturally just after my 41st birthday. That ended in miscarriage at seven weeks. We were both so devastated we realised we wanted to try again. We travelled to Athens, to a new clinic and a new set of protocols, and I had an operation to remove a uterine septum. Within a month, I was pregnant again. At seven weeks, we had a scan and saw and heard a heartbeat. At eight weeks, the heartbeat had gone. By now, the UK was in the grip of its first national Covid lockdown. I took pills to trigger a miscarriage at home. The pain was horrendous. Of my three miscarriages, this was the worst to get through.

I took a few months off the ceaseless trying in order to feel my way back into my own body, to reconnect with who I was when I wasn’t riding a wave of pregnancy hormones, or having my insides prodded and scanned and examined by unfamiliar hands. When Covid restrictions started to lift, I was allowed to book a sports massage at home via an app. The masseur was Polish and when he began working on the left-hand side of my lower stomach, I gasped. He had pressed the exact point where I felt the aching, yawning tenderness of pregnancy loss. It was a very specific sensation, starting in the womb, then spreading through my synapses. I thought I might faint.

“You have a lot of sadness here,” the masseur said.

“Yes,” I replied, eyes closed, trying not to cry.

Lockdowns lifted, vaccinations rolled out, and fertility clinics resumed their normal business. We had been recommended a place in LA by friends. This clinic, we were told, was at the forefront of fertility medicine (“Because lots of Hollywood stars get to their late 40s and the acting parts dry up and then they decide they want a child,” said one of my more cynical acquaintances).

The clinic’s website looked impressive and claimed to offer several cutting-edge procedures that weren’t available anywhere else. In October 2021, Justin and I joined a Zoom call with one of the leading consultants, who apparently had a legion of celebrity children to his name. He was robotic in manner, listing all the ways in which he could ensure higher than average success rates. He advised egg donation.

The doctor made it seem straightforward. All we had to do was find a suitable donor, for which he recommended hiring a “fertility consultant”. This person would assess relevant medical histories and physical traits in potential donors to ensure their compatibility. In the UK, it is illegal to pay someone for their eggs but donors can receive up to £985 expenses per cycle. Donor-conceived children then have the right to access identifying information about their donor when they turn 18. But in the US, the laws are different – donors are paid a fee (typically, $5,000 to $10,000, but sometimes tens of thousands of dollars), and you can access hundreds of websites containing extensive profiles and photographs. It was surreal and a little dystopian scrolling through pages upon pages of beautiful women whom you could filter according to height, education, hair and eye colour. The women answered questions about their favourite books (The Alchemist and Harry Potter were popular choices and, for me I’m afraid, automatic cause for disqualification). They also listed their preferred foods and hobbies. It felt like a strange kind of speed dating.

It took us over a year to find our donor. We got close a few times, but then we’d uncover some incompatible medical issue or they would change their minds and pull out. We also got defrauded by the consultant we’d hired, and the clinic was shockingly poor in its communication. The whole thing cost an inordinate amount of time and money, and I’m aware of my privilege in being able – just about – to afford it. Still, it was one of the most stressful periods of my life.

Eventually, we found an amazing young woman (favourite book: Plato’s Republic) who wanted to help us. We remain so incredibly grateful to her.

The donor’s egg retrieval was scheduled in LA. On the other side of the Atlantic, my cycle was synced with hers. The eggs were then fertilised with my husband’s sperm, resulting in four embryos, two of which were deemed to have a good cell number, minimal fragmentation and optimal symmetry. The embryos were awarded an AA grade, as if they were premium hotels. Apparently, these two had the highest chances of implantation in my womb (and were presumably offered late checkout and in-room spa treatments).

Justin and I flew out to LA on Boxing Day 2022. The weather was terrible – one of those freak patches of torrential rain that sometimes beset the city – and our windscreen wipers squeaked and slid across the glass as we drove to the clinic. I changed into a surgical gown and lay on a gurney before being wheeled into theatre to have the embryo transferred via catheter to my womb. Before I was sedated, our doctor beamed a picture of our chosen embryo on to a TV screen hung high up on the wall.

“An absolutely beautiful embryo,” he said.

I squeezed Justin’s hand more tightly.

This time, I thought, I had done everything right. I had taken all the drugs and undergone all the necessary surgical interventions and been monitored closely by the best medical professionals. I had gone to acupuncture and yoga and followed nutritional advice and eaten shedloads of protein and taken the correct supplements. I had done all the spiritual work I possibly could. I had followed everyone’s advice. All the signs were there. This time, I tried to convince myself, it was going to be OK.

In the 10-day waiting period that followed, Justin had to return to London for work and I stayed in LA, with a quietly blooming feeling of cautious optimism. I had all the pregnancy symptoms – mid-afternoon exhaustion, nausea, sore boobs, vivid dreams. I went for a walk along Venice Beach one afternoon and wrote the name we’d picked out for our child in the sand.

On the allotted morning, I went into the clinic for a blood test and was told I’d be phoned that afternoon with the results. Instead, they sent me an email. They had analysed my bloods. I wasn’t pregnant. “Cease all medication immediately,” the email read. Those symptoms I’d been experiencing? They were simply a result of the hormones I’d been taking. And all those signs I’d believed had been sent from the universe? They hadn’t meant a thing either.

Justin cancelled everything and flew back to LA so we could be together – an act of love, if ever there was one. But I felt unmoored and exhausted and horribly sad. I remember FaceTiming with my best friend, Emma, shortly after we’d got the news.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

“They look a bit … funny.”

I glanced at myself reflected in the screen and could see straight away what she meant. My eyes were glittery and disconnected, as if I were viewing the world from the seabed of a deep ocean. I didn’t recognise my own features. I didn’t recognise myself.

***

Back in London, I wasn’t sure what to do next. We still had one embryo left. The clinic advised us to try again straight away, possibly with a surrogate, but I just couldn’t face it. Well-meaning strangers would mention adoption, without realising that the adoption process is itself far from straightforward and could take years. I was already 44 and felt lost and letdown. I was angry with our doctor, angry at the callousness of the clinic’s email, angry at the entire fertility industry, and angry with anyone who had ever had an uncomplicated pregnancy that ended with a healthy child being born. But, most of all, I was angry at the illusory stories I’d believed – all those beautiful lies I’d told myself.

I went for breakfast with a friend. She had recently split from a long-term partner and, in passing, mentioned a psychic who had given her a freakishly accurate telephone reading in which a future romance was outlined in detail.

And even though I thought I was done with that woo‑woo stuff, I just couldn’t help myself.

“Could I speak to her?” I asked.

My friend gave me the psychic’s number and a few key pieces of advice: text to arrange the appointment; don’t give your full name (no possibility of her Googling); and when she calls, don’t ask her any questions (too leading).

I followed her advice to the letter. The psychic, whom I will call Alexia, called me at 7pm on a Wednesday evening. Her voice was warm, her accent American.

“Is Elizabeth your real name?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“OK, let’s see what’s here for you.” A pause. “Well,” she chuckled. “You love words.”

I did! I loved words so much! At the most challenging points of my fertility journey, I often counted myself incredibly lucky to have a writing career I was passionate about. I had written eight books when I spoke to Alexia and my ninth was about to be published. She went on to say several other things that were spot-on, including identifying that my partner’s name began with a J and describing what he did for a living. Alexia asked if my mother had experienced neck pain recently (I later checked: she’d just booked a session with an osteopath after putting her neck out).

“OK, so you write books but do you also do something else?” Alexia continued. “I’m getting … it’s almost like, I don’t know … you’re a life coach helping people through their failures or mistakes?”

Since 2018, I’ve had a podcast called How to Fail, where I interview guests about three times they’ve failed in their lives and what they might have learned along the way. Not quite life coaching, but not a million miles away either. To reiterate: Alexia didn’t know my full name so wouldn’t have been able to look me up online. Might she have recognised my voice from the podcast? I felt it was unlikely given that she was American, and most of my listeners are UK-based. Also, if she had actually been able to research me, wouldn’t she have been more direct and simply stated outright that I was a podcaster? Similarly, although she could tell instantly I was a writer, it took her about half an hour to identify correctly whether I wrote books or film scripts – again, with no guidance from me. Not once did she mention journalism, even though that is one of the first things that comes up if you do Google me. All of this gave me confidence in her, even in my newly sceptical state.

Then, after about 40 minutes, Alexia said: “I feel as if you’re grappling with letting go of a lifelong desire. You don’t know whether to let it go or not.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied, on the other end of the phone line. “That makes sense.”

“I don’t know whether it’s to do with children but, if it is, I want to tell you – and I don’t always talk about past lives, but with you I get a very strong sense that you were a mother in a past life. You were the mother of six and it almost melted you.”

It was such a striking phrase that I noted it down afterwards. “Melted” was the precise word she used.

“And I feel this life has been offered to you to live on your own terms,” Alexia continued. “Which might be why, if you’ve tried to have babies before now, you could have experienced fertility issues or miscarriage.”

I was dumbstruck. The number six was particularly important. I’d had three miscarriages and undergone three unsuccessful rounds of fertility treatment and each cycle had ended after an embryo transfer. Essentially, I’d had six failed pregnancies.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Alexia carried on. “Sometimes, when we push really, really hard for something we think we want, and there seem to be lots of obstacles in our way, it’s because we’re being protected.”

She told me a story of her own, about a relative whose child had been in a car accident and who was now in a persistent vegetative state. It had been a living tragedy, Alexia said, and so, really, there was no guarantee that having a child led to the happiness we yearn for.

“I hope you don’t mind me sharing that,” Alexia said.

“No, no, of course not.”

In truth, I was grateful. So often during the preceding 12 years, I’d told myself a hundred different fairytales of how completed I’d feel by motherhood. But in a world where the most positive version of events exists, there also has to be the possibility of the most negative, too: a child who is ill or unhappy or who doesn’t love you back. Alexia gave me permission to imagine that. She gave me permission to stop trying so hard without it feeling like weakness. When she gave me that permission, I didn’t feel sadness; I felt relief. Because sometimes quitting, not persisting, is the bravest thing you can do.

And the thing was, I had always had a deep-rooted, secret feeling that I knew what it was to be a mother. I felt I had held babies in my arms and taken a toddler’s pudgy hand in mine, and smelled that milky, biscuity scent from the back of a sleeping child’s neck. It was as if my soul remembered. So, no, maybe I wouldn’t be a mother in this lifetime. But maybe I had been in the past. Maybe I would be in another.

I’m sure there will be people reading this who don’t believe Alexia was accessing some collective spiritual energy to deliver me the message I most needed to hear. They will argue that she kept her observations vague enough that I could interpret whatever I wanted from them. And that’s totally fine. I’m not trying to convert anyone. If you didn’t have the experience I did, you can’t know how utterly real it felt to me.

After speaking to her, I started to wonder whether all those signs from the universe (or whatever you want to call it) were in fact guiding me and protecting me. It’s simply that the destination wasn’t the one I’d pictured, so I was interpreting them wrongly. And there was part of me – the bruised, defensive part – that thought, well, even if none of this is true, isn’t it easier for me to believe it is?

I started asking myself: what if my purpose in this lifetime was not to be a mother? What if, instead, it was to speak for others who go through similar pain and to reassure them that there is hope on the other side of it? What if I chose to focus on the abundance of love I already had in my life, rather than the absence of another kind? We cannot, all of us, have everything.

The next day, I walked past a woman pushing her child in a buggy in the street. I smiled at her. All the bitterness and angst I had felt for so long had evaporated. It was magical; almost miraculous. At first, I didn’t think the sensation would last. Yet now, almost three years later, I still feel that same lifted peace. Of course, I also still feel grief, but it’s not constant. Sometimes, the sadness will rear up in unexpected moments and I’ve learned to let it, because I know it will pass. I’ve learned, too, that just because we feel sad for the life we didn’t live, doesn’t mean we made the wrong choices in this one.

Although I haven’t felt the need to contact Alexia again, I’ve booked a number of sessions for loved ones going through challenges. Each time, they report back to me and are astonished by her accuracy and the comfort she is able to give them. Each time, she says something different. A friend who didn’t believe in psychics, who gave a fake name for himself and his family members, has been fundamentally changed by what Alexia was able to tell him about a sick relative, his career and his relationship.

A few months after my own experience with Alexia, I started writing a new novel. The plot and the characters came to me in a blissful rush. I wrote as if the brakes had been taken off, as if I were no longer pushing a metaphorical boulder up an unforgiving hill. I wrote, in short, as if being myself was enough. It was the most fun and creatively fulfilling experience I’ve ever had writing a book. It will be published a few days after the baby whose name I wrote in the sand would have turned two.

And that text I received from the kid with the broken phone? I Googled it recently. It’s an internet scam. I suppose it could have been a sign from the universe to stop believing false promises. But maybe it wasn’t a sign at all. Maybe our task in this world is to build our own meanings – like fires lit from the kindling of many lives.

• One of Us by Elizabeth Day is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.