When you’re going through infertility you live every second of your life suspended between hope and disappointment: the disappointment crashed over me in waves after each loss or setback, the hope kept me pushing forward. But eventually I reached the point where I was starting to imagine what my future as a woman without biological children was going to look like. It was a jagged, raw, hurting transition. Some days I inched towards acceptance, other days I resisted with every fibre.
Then I got pregnant. I felt foolish and angry with myself for not going back on the Pill, for not having the guts to follow through on all the emotional work I had done to move on from the trying to conceive years. I was absolutely certain it would end with a miscarriage, or worse. After all I was almost 43, with a diagnosis of Diminished Ovarian Reserve, and three miscarriages, a Termination for Medical Reasons and two failed cycles of IVF to show for the last five years. I made sure I got the medical attention I needed but otherwise didn’t tell anyone, and my husband and I got on with not investing any of our fragile, endlessly-battered hope in those two blue lines.
We only started to consider the possibility the pregnancy might stick after the 12-week scan. Up to that point I’d had lots of scans, but all of them with my eyes screwed shut until the doctor confirmed there was still a heartbeat. Even after 12 weeks, I didn’t really believe it was real. I enacted endless rituals, little offerings to the universe to make sure no-one could punish me for complacency. When we went away for a weekend I always made sure I had lots of sanitary pads with me (so I wouldn’t be caught out when the miscarriage started). I never bought more than one packet of my progesterone tablets at a time (because bulk buying would assume the pregnancy was going to last beyond the end of a packet of tablets). I’m now 32 weeks and I still do this stuff. I know none of it makes sense – but I can’t stop.
Because I was mainly working from home and didn’t have much social life due to COVID, I was able to get to 20 weeks without needing to tell anyone. When I was out and about I wore a baggy top, and got away with it. But then a big, in-person work event came around, and I knew I had to start sharing the news.
Sharing with colleagues, friends and family was the most intense week of the pregnancy. The responses from colleagues who didn’t know anything about our story were exactly what you’d expect when someone shares pregnancy news: straightforward, happy well-wishing. The interactions left me feeling confused and fraudulent. I didn’t know how to respond. Somehow I managed to stop myself grabbing their arm and whispering “you do realise this could end any day?” I would come home, exhausted, and tell myself that my bump was the proof I had been pregnant. When I lost the pregnancy, as I knew I would, no-one would be able to call me mad or a liar. It was like a pregnancy version of imposter syndrome, so thoroughly had I internalised the idea of myself as a childless woman (and specifically, as someone who didn’t deserve to be pregnant). I’m only now managing to identify and let go of those thoughts.
After spending the first five months not engaging with the pregnancy at a practical level, I’ve had some catching up to do. The necessary tasks of buying a car seat, figuring out how I’m going to feed, organising my parental leave admin, have helped ground me in this new reality. And needless to say, these tasks are all pure, unalloyed joy.
In my first blog I wrote that I felt trapped in the ‘deep, dark silence of the infertile woman’. It went beyond the day-to-day isolation to something more basic; I felt like my credentials as a human being were in question. I’ll never forget the overwhelming sense of the silence that would stretch out into the future after I died. I knew this was a feeling I needed to challenge and I did, but it still made me ache. Writing helped me find my voice again, but it still felt disembodied – a cathartic but ultimately anonymous act, separate to my day-to-day self and relationships. One of the things I had been working towards was the moment of knitting myself back together again – of owning my experience of infertility and my identity as a childless woman publicly, in my day-to-day life. For me that would have been a big step, and I even wrote a blog about crossing the threshold into permanent childlessness that I was thinking of publishing under my name in the organisation where I work.
That won’t happen now. It feels odd to go from the stigmatised, subversive and challenging identity of the childless woman, to being someone who has had their deepest wish fulfilled. There’s something almost banal about it. I refuse to use the term miracle baby - who wants to be a ‘miracle’? It doesn’t seem fair to dump my kid with that label, and anyway this isn’t a miracle, it’s random chance and wonderful, beautiful good fortune. So in a funny way it feels like full circle, because now I am exploring silence again. Not the old silence, of someone whose experience is erased by society’s narratives. But the silence of someone who feels that quietly and gratefully getting on with being the luckiest person alive is all I need to do right now.
I hope that if I use my voice for anything in future it will be to help bridge between different worlds. I will never presume to understand the experience of someone who truly has crossed the threshold and is living the years as a childless man or woman, and renewing their life in meaningful ways on that basis. Or who is struggling to renew their sense of meaning - because it is so, so hard. But I hope my experience of infertility, of reaching the end of the road and deeply contemplating my future without children, and then of becoming a biological parent when I no longer expected it to happen, will help me find the understanding and empathy to build more inclusive connections between different people, whatever their story.