The moment will be in the film reel that flashes before my eyes when I die: the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2020, the lockdown one.

I am sitting at my desk at the top of my house, door closed, pretending I am wrapping presents while my three-year-old plays downstairs with her dad – my husband – and my sister.

My eyes closed, blood thudding in my ears, I repeat: ‘Please don’t be pregnant, please don’t be pregnant’, a silent prayer in my head while my phone counts down 60 seconds.

When I open my eyes there are two definitive, unapologetic blue lines on the stick. My stomach drops. The feeling is of shock and horror at the future that just a few moments ago was in front of me, collapsing.

Four days previously, after years of loneliness, sadness, denial, fear and guilt – and months of painful couples therapy – I did the thing I never thought I’d be brave enough to do: I told my husband we had to separate.

He didn’t want to. But, reluctantly, he’d agreed. We’d get through Christmas, then we’d find a place for him to rent and begin telling our families.

And now I was pregnant. With his baby, to be clear – but absolutely not a planned one.

I hid the test, ran down the stairs and out of the house and called my best friend.

‘What am I going to do now?’ I asked, as if she, or anyone, could answer that question.

My husband and I met when I was 23, a week after I graduated from university. He was my much older (and at the time married) boss, the owner of the gallery I had started working at.

Charming, charismatic and successful, he knew what he wanted and how to get it – and he’d wanted me. It was intoxicating.

We had a great time together. We had a shared love of art and travelled the world for work. I loved being with him.

By the time I was 25, and he 52, he was divorced and six years later we were married. My friends and family loved him and thought we were a great match.

In 2017 our daughter was born – my first child, his fourth. Once she arrived, however, the differences between us that I’d long feared could play out badly were no longer just a hypothetical worry but a reality.

He was from a different generation, raised in a military family and boarding school-educated from the age of seven. He had high expectations and was easily irritated. My family, by contrast, were more laid-back: financially chaotic but incredibly close.

Our parenting styles were also diametrically opposed. Then there was the imbalance in our careers and financial positions.

By this point he earned everything. We’d wound down the gallery a few years earlier so he could focus on his other business, an art conservations studio, and I had begun to launch a career as a writer. But that did not pay me yet.

We were always both very ambitious, but in having a child our lives diverged and our roles divided: his to work, mine to the baby.

Money-wise it made sense; it wasn’t my career that paid for our beautiful, four-bedroom house in north London, that fed or clothed us. But I felt worthless, a total financial drain.

He worked long hours, while I was by myself with the baby. Night feeds were all down to me; he had to get up and go to work in the morning. After all he was earning, not me.

I felt like I was disappearing and so alone. I wanted a partner to be a team with, to see the funny side when we were facing a baby projectile vomiting over the duvet at 2am.

I tried to bring him into my world, to make him understand my experience of our new life. I tried talking, writing him letters, sending him articles that resonated and suggested that we listen to podcasts together.

But nothing landed, nothing changed. His life remained the same – and mine was unrecognisable.

As lost as I felt, there’s nothing like motherhood to motivate you. I remember one day, when she was about a year old, tidying the bathroom floor and the thought struck me: would I want this relationship for my daughter? If she ever felt this way, what would I want to have shown her she could do?

Yet I couldn’t see how I could rip our life apart and be a single mother, now that my career was non-existent. I gaslit myself into believing it would be better to stay, to keep going.

Instead, I started therapy. Six months later I began taking antidepressants for anxiety, and what I suspect was postnatal depression. But the doubts didn’t lift.

Then, when my daughter was due to start nursery aged two and a half, I started a one-year post-graduate course in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts.

I felt alive and full of purpose again. I could finally see who I was, the potential for my career, how I had value outside of motherhood.

And I felt stronger, like perhaps there was another way forward. Maybe.

As soon as the course ended in summer 2020, I returned to therapy and within a few weeks the counsellor suggested couples therapy.

My husband was happy to try. I think he thought it was to help me, and we would merely find out how to improve our marriage.

Our first session was at 6pm on Friday, October 30, via Zoom. Socially distanced, the three of us spoke into laptop screens, the therapist in his room, me at my desk at home, my husband in his office.

Within the first half an hour, the one thing I was terrified of accidentally revealing came pouring out. In floods of tears, I said I didn’t know if I wanted to be in the relationship any more.

My husband was blindsided – I could see the shock in his face. It was like a car crash happening in front of you, except you’re driving the car.

Then we logged off and he had to come home.

Each Friday night we did the same dance. We logged on, terrified it might be the session that ended us. Afterwards we’d close our laptop screens, and he’d open a bottle of champagne as if to celebrate that the session hadn’t completed destroyed us, as if everything was still fine.

But I couldn’t keep denying my feelings.

It was about six sessions in, during the final one before Christmas, that I said I wanted a trial separation. My husband had always said he didn’t believe in trial separations; you’re either in or you’re out.

But the pendulum had swung and I could see the way out.

And now, just four days later, I was facing the one thing that would send me back to square one. Or maybe minus square one. I was pregnant again.

Instantly I knew I couldn’t go through a pregnancy and newborn stage alone with a small child. I admire people who feel able to, but I couldn’t single-handedly face the postnatal depression, the stopping of my career, the re-launching of my career. It had taken so much with only one child, how would I do it with two?

If we had the baby, the trial separation couldn’t happen. But then what? How would we stay together? Could I knowingly bring a child into this precarious situation, one where their parents had planned to separate?

But, scariest of all, if I had the baby and nothing got better between us, could I find the courage to begin the process of separating again?

On the other hand, could I go through with an abortion? If I didn’t have this baby, my daughter would likely never have a sibling – this was her baby too.

I am the eldest of three and my siblings are my best friends and biggest support. I wanted her to have that.

And I was 38. One of my best friends was adopting a child as a single mother, the other was entering her fifth unsuccessful round of IVF. And here I was, one ‘make-it-not-be-true-our-marriage-is-over’ night later, considering an abortion.

‘I think whatever you do is fine,’ my best friend said over the phone, as my husband sat unknowingly inside the house, ‘but you have to tell him.’

My biggest fear was that his certainty about having this baby would be so strong that I would be pulled along with whatever he wanted. I knew I had to work out what I wanted first.

So for three days I held the secret and I journalled. Every thought, every fear, every permutation. And once I’d written enough down to have a sense of what I felt – not a decision, but an awareness of my fears, the complexity of my conflicting emotions and the words with which to articulate them – I suggested that he and I go for a walk.

His face was a sunbeam when I told him; he was delighted, as I knew he would be. Then I read him everything I had written down. ‘I’ll support whatever you decide,’ he said afterwards. I was relieved, but no clearer on what to do.

I called my mum. ‘You have to forget everything else and just decide first whether you want a baby or not,’ she told me. ‘Everything else, you can work out after that.’

Put like that, it was more manageable. To my surprise, I realised I did want the baby. I never would have engineered this situation but, against the odds, here was a sibling for our daughter and a chance to do things differently. Maybe that would be enough to repair us.

Once the decision was made, I was excited about the pregnancy. Carefully, I reiterated to my husband that this was not a guarantee we would stay together for ever. It was a baby and we’ll see. A chance to do things differently.

Some things did feel different. For one, my career was taking off. Months earlier, in the spring of 2020, I had launched a project, Lockdown Love Stories, gathering people’s anonymous confessions of how the pandemic had affected their love lives. Every day, I would go out and chalk www.lockdownlovestories.com throughout parks across London so people could submit their story to my website.

I received 1,500 submissions, which I shared on social media. I was learning about the complexities of love not just through my own relationship but through those of strangers.

At 39 weeks pregnant, I launched an exhibition of the stories as art works on shop fronts across high streets in London. The project led to TV and radio appearances. I was even working on a pitch for a book.

I immersed myself in my work because I loved it – and because I knew I had limited time before the baby came and I would have to switch focus. But it also fulfilled a need for connection that I couldn’t find at home.

Because, while we were technically still together, the relationship was badly damaged. The hurt and shock my husband had felt when I asked for a separation had now morphed into anger and coldness.

Two days after launching that multi-site exhibition in August 2021, I gave birth at home, early; so quickly not even the midwives arrived in time. It was a boy.

He was perfection, and we were both better parents this time around. But our relationship remained the same.

You can’t unsay the things you’ve said, nor can you forget your wife wanted to leave. The atmosphere between us was toxic, and we were fighting every day.

But as I had feared, it was hard – as hard as the first time – to initiate the conversation to restart couples therapy, to stop avoiding the thing that needed confronting.

A year before, I’d figuratively doused us in petrol and set us on fire. We’d thrown a blanket over the fire – and now I had to set us on fire again, knowing what it felt like the first time.

It took another couple of months to get back in that therapy room in spring 2022, this time face-to-face at the therapist’s practice. When they asked us how we were, my husband said he thought we were going to be fine. I thought I was going insane. How could this ever be fine?

A couple of sessions in, I said the words again: ‘We have to separate.’

What followed were small steps and periods of standing still. We were trying to be gentle – after all we had a five-year-old and a ten‑month-old – to be kind, not to push, but somehow keep going.

We sought professional advice on the best way to tell our daughter and make it as painless for her as possible.

For four months we still lived together while we looked for a place nearby for him to rent, then waited another month for the existing tenants to leave. A few days before he was due to move out, we told our daughter that Mummy and Daddy were going to live in two houses from now on.

‘For real?’ she said and burst into tears. Yet, just as quickly, she switched onto the practicalities of where the car would be kept for the school run.

The day he moved out, even though I’d wanted this for so long, I felt intense grief. I walked round the supermarket in circles. I picked up a pot of hummus and realised he was the only one who ever ate it, and now I didn’t have to buy it any more.

But I knew I had to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t turn back just because it was difficult. I put the hummus down and left the supermarket. Afterwards, I felt calmer, more myself.

Although we’re not quite through to the other side – the divorce is yet to be finalised – we settled into a routine as a family. He came round daily to see the children. I woke up on my 40th birthday, almost two years to the day after asking to separate the first time, without my husband but with our two children beside me.

It had been a circuitous route, but I had arrived at the same place – and now with the addition of the most loved little boy.

Since then, I’ve restarted my career for the second time. It’s Complicated, my book of anonymous lockdown love stories, was published earlier this year.

I hope I’ve shown other women what is possible, whatever love, work and motherhood throws at you. That I’ve shown my daughter what she can do if she ever needs to.

This time, I didn’t even need to get pregnant to do it.

It’s Complicated: Confessions Of Messy Modern Love, by Philippa Found (Pavilion Books, £12.99), is out now. Find out more at its‑complicated.com