Category Archives: Infertility

This is our journey before adoption – when we were trying for children (somewhat unsuccessfully) and then fertility clinics at the hospital.

Dodgy Advice On How To Get Pregnant

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‘How’s it going?’

The question that all couples who are trying for a baby love to hear.  Not.  The ‘not this month’ answer is too depressing and ‘twice last week, once this, we’re still piling pillows under my bum’ is straying dangerously into oversharing territory.

Our friends wanted to support us but what were they supposed to do?

Cheerleading

After all, they can hardly stand in our bedroom by the side of the bed with those big fluffy pompoms, chanting “Give Us a Bee, Give Us an Ay, Give Us another Bee, Give Us a Why, What Have You Got?  A BABY!!” because that’s not going to help us conceive.

But it’s hard to just sit by and watch someone’s dreams of having a child evaporate, so instead they would pass on advice that was highly unscientific and barely proven – just because you can draw a Venn Diagram with an overlap between two unrelated items does not mean that there is a causal relationship between them.  I like using purple ink in my fountain pen and am gluten-intolerant, but the that doesn’t mean that the ink causes my intolerance.  Still why let scientific principles get in the way of a pointless suggestion to help us get pregnant?

Apparently, we needed to:

Go On Holiday

Despite peering through the small print on many a holiday contract (the first few lines at least), I’ve never found travel agents warning me that ‘this holiday could result in pregnancy.’   Are there perhaps special ‘ovulation breaks’ where you get to time your holiday to your ovulation cycle and ensure that your holiday falls mid-cycle for optimum baby-making?

Perhaps our friends hoped that being away from all the stress, and having not much to do would help.  However, in the climate I yearn for on holiday (sunny for sandal-toting, coat-abandoning warmth), my husband’s skins welters into a irritatingly tickly and painful heat rash and when that happens, there’s no way I am getting anywhere near his body, not even for a few minutes of serious sexual communion.   But that wasn’t the main reason we had to reject this solution – we blew so much money on our honeymoon-of-a-lifetime, our holiday funds were as overdrawn as the British government.

Next?

Quit Our Job(s)

Apparently someone (one person, you call that cause and effect?) had had trouble conceiving, quit their job and miraculously became pregnant. By the same unrelated lack of cause-and-effect I bet someone got pregnant after signing a petition, closing their MySpace account or cleaning out the hamster’s cage.  Forgive me for my sarcasm, but I expect it was having sex that got them pregnant, not quitting their job.

Now my job was not great and my boss was an obnoxious bully who shouted at me, paid me less than half I was worth and I tried to leap at this vague equationless science, because I was really fed up with a git of a boss and felt sure I would’ve been  more amenable to Andy’s advances if I wasn’t wound as tight as an old lady who’d waited 30 minutes in a queue at the Post Office for her pension.  I’d be happier, less stressed and who knows Andy, it might just work, I reasoned one evening.  He countered that I had to find another job first.  He can be so reasonable and logical at times.  Spoil sport.

Next?

Get A Dog

Random or what?  The RSPCA/ Dog’s Trust would have serious problems re-homing dogs if their leaflet was legally obliged to mention that there was a high risk of pregnancy involved in the arrival of your pooch.  I have plenty of friends who have dogs and none of them have spontaneously grown a child within them and conversely friends who became pregnant without even petting a dachshund.  (I recall the irony of a work colleague a generation older than me, telling me categorically that I shouldn’t get a dog “because what happens when you want to go on holiday?” and in the same breath telling me to hurry up and have kids “before it’s too late.”)

I am not getting a dog.

But the psychobabble our friends were spouting showed just how much we were all running out of ideas.  That coupled with our total lack of results in two years told us we needed to go and seek professional help.

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What If I Am Meant To Adopt?

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We’ve started the adoption process and as we drive into town to do some shopping, I am pondering our life, our childlessness, the strangeness of what we’re going through, a tangle of confusion and grief and hope and anger and frustration.  And amongst a trail of similar forgettable days, this one is about to be remembered.

A Tiny Flicker

The sun’s shining and as we drive up a hill, over the canal, through some green traffic lights (this mundane location is about to become ingrained on my mind) a thought enters, bypassing thinking and debate, then spinning my heart on its way directly to my core, my soul.

I start. (I’m glad I’m not driving).

I catch my breath.

Oh.

My eyes widen and water.

The thought is more than just an idea…

It is a New Truth.

My heart recognises it immediately, like the voice of a friend you haven’t heard in years cutting through the chatter in a crowded room, but my mind toys with it, rolling it around my brain as it works out how it connects will all the other stuff in there.  And yet when it settles in the right place, it’s clear this thought was meant to be there all along.

There are moments in our lives when a tiny shift makes sense of your life and you experience a new reality.  This is one of those.

And that truth that I did not conjure up, but found me in the midst of heartache, reverberates like a tuning fork to happiness, bringing silent tears of joy.

What If?

It’s a simple idea.  So simple you might not even recognise its majesty when you read it.  So simple as to be blindingly obvious in a ‘why haven’t I thought of that before?’ shrug and yet, it is deeply moving and profound.

They’re already here.

Oh.

O.M.G.

What a magnificent, expansive, exhilarating thought!

What if the children who need us most as their parents are already here?

My mind jumps and creates an image of children, not far from here, already here, already born, who will be our children, but who came through a different route.  An invisible thread connecting me to some children who need me.

This truth tells me gently that life is going to plan, if not the plan that we wrote for ourselves.

I will be a parent, I will have children, I will be a mum, I will have a family.

My hope is reborn.

And in that hope, my tears of grief for the child we never bore turn to tears of joy for the children who are already born.

The universe has other plans for me

 

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One in Six

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It never really occurred to me that we might have difficulty conceiving a child.  In my twenties, the fear of finding myself pregnant had felt very real – as if I was just one forgotten pill or one split condom away from a life-changing child and a difficult conversation with my mum.  Even in my late thirties, I still believed that the only thing standing between me and a blue line on a pregnancy test was the rigorous use of contraception.

The Baby Button

I naively imagined that the minute we pressed GO on the “having a baby” button, and threw both caution and contraception to the wind (not literally, that would be littering) that I would get pregnant.  I was surprised when we weren’t pregnant the first month after our honeymoon – with a frowny “but we pressed GO” reaction.  As if the universe hadn’t realised that we wanted a baby.  That surprise turned slowly to sour disappointment when it dragged into a year of being annoyingly on-time with my period.

We tried to boost our chances – using a fertility thermometer, then pee sticks and then various smartphone apps to help us predict the best days to bonk.  None of which seemed to have any impact at all – for after nearly two years of trying..

We Were Stubbornly NOT Pregnant

Not to worry, I thought.  Time to call in the specialists.  I held medical science to an unattainably high standard, after all if they can transplant organs, 3D print new body parts, see into our brains – surely getting a woman pregnant is no biggie?  I dreamed of machines that go ping and a raft of X rays that would magically explain the problem and give us the simple answer to sort it out and give us the much-yearned after child.  Yet after relatively few tests (not the barrage I hoped for) we were given our official diagnosis:

We Don’t Know

But not in so many words.  The official phrase was “unexplained infertility.”  They had done some tests and everything seemed in order, so they had no idea why we couldn’t have children. And therein lay the problem – for if they don’t know what is wrong, there is nothing they can do to fix it.

One in Six

It’s a lonely business being infertile. There’s nothing anyone can do to help, and people don’t know what to say or how to talk about it – there’s a lot of staring at the ground as people trip over possible ways to revive the conversation.  Yet one in six couples experience problems. Where are they all, and why wasn’t there a place to go and talk with people who understood what I was going through?

They Offered Us Leaflets

We were given a leaflet about counselling and the doctors strongly urged us to consider IVF. Yet, when we discovered the statistics published online, there were no clinics within hundreds of miles who had successfully created a baby from a woman of my age.  I was 41 years old and on the IVF scrapheap.

We went away, cried, hugged and I licked my wounded pride.  I would never feel a baby grow inside my body, never have stories of cravings, or stretch marks, or a tiny bladder to share.  I would never experience a child kicking or being born from my body.  And that was no easy dream to give up on.

But We Could Still Have A Family

When Andy and I first started talking about having a family, we would say that we wanted children “if not ours, then someone else’s.”  Yet neither of us really thought that we would need to fall back on that option.

And here it was, staring us in the face, the only route left open: adoption.

 

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