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.