Lizzie’s Story

Lizzie Lowrie is an author, speaker and co-leads StoryHouse; an independent coffee shop, charity and church in Crosby, where she lives with her vicar-husband Dave and their dog Betsy.

My husband Dave and I first started trying for a family soon after we got married, but by the time I was 33 we’d walked through a total of six recurrent miscarriages. It was totally devastating.

To make matters worse, we lost our fourth, fifth and sixth pregnancies while we were living in Cambridge, where Dave was training to be a Church of England vicar at time. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by tons of vicars wives with lots of children.

I felt lost, overlooked, and unable to fit in, as I struggled to navigate our continued childlessness and to cope with the weight of my grief.

But the moment that really changed everything for me, was meeting another woman who was facing some similar fertility struggles and realising that I wasn’t alone.

Soon afterwards, we began to gather a few other women and form a support group together. That group became a total life-saver for me.

Since then, we’ve relocated back to Liverpool, but I still love talking about the messiness of life over a flat white and creating safe spaces for people to share their stories, which is why I linked up with the team at SPACE.

I’ve also written a blog about some of my experiences called Salt Water & Honey, and last year I had the opportunity to publish my story as a book - a memoir, which is also entitled ‘Salt Water & Honey’.

You can learn more about it here.

Time has moved on since then, but being childless remains a very complex form of grief. Day to day, it’s still painful.

The desire to have a child is still there, but I am also learning that my life has value beyond the role of being a mother too.