Sonja Roos
It has always been a dream to to a be a mother. Unfortunately, not all dreams are made to come true, no that dream for us was destined to remain just that, a dream. The realisation of this did not come easy. No, we had to endure 6 IVF cycles to come to this point, 6 gruelling egg collection cycles, 6 cycles of walking on the fine line between hope and devastation, of hoping and praying.
Yet sometimes, you can have all the hope, prayer, positive vibes and thoughts, it just does not change the reality of things. Sometimes, life just sucks.
I remember packing our bags and moving to a whole new country in the hope of giving our future children more opportunities. I was so excited when I saw what our new home had to offer and even more excited when we started trying. After about 9 months of no success, and no longer finding trying fun, our worlds came crashing down, when we realised that my husband could not reproduce naturally due to a medical condition.
The fertility gods then also played a further cruel joke by giving me a low ovarian reserve at the age of 28 which equals not so great egg quality. We were the lucky winners of the infertility lottery. Our prize was IVF. I don’t think I have ever felt so defeated in my entire life, the notion of having to stab myself with needles didn’t excite me either but as my husband love to say “it is what it is”.
We started trying to conceive in early 2020 and by January 2021 we were doing our first cycle. How I hated every moment of it. During our journey, was also the time in my life when I was the most angry and depressed, I could not believe that we had to pay money and undergo invasive, procedures just to get what others get for free. We got the good and the bad of IVF but unfortunately for us it was more bad than good.
We tried to conceived for 3 years. Our first IVF cycle got cancelled because my hormone levels were not looking great. The second time, was probably for me, the worst. It was my 30th birthday and we were told that we were going to get a lot of mature eggs. Fertility gods chuckling in the background saying ‘yeah right’. We got a total of 0 eggs that day. I have never felt like more of a useless woman in my life. The third and fourth time around we got only one embryo but unsurprisingly it did not stick.
December 2021 was one of our best ones. We had used the last of my husband’s sperm that we extracted through an operation. We had an amazing embryo and it actually stuck. I was pregnant. I could almost not believe it, I already started thinking about how the nursery would look. However, about at 7 weeks on 10 January 2022 I lost the pregnancy.
We tried one more cycle in early 2022, we actually used donor sperm, although my husband was not sold on the idea and was I being a bit selfish by pushing him into it. Some days I think that the universe totally agreed with him because this cycle we were told that none of my eggs had fertilised. At this stage it felt like my uterus was the place were embryos went to die and my ovaries were just giving me the middle finger.
It was around this time, or maybe even earlier, that I started to weight the meaning of the words “giving up”. Were we actually giving up if we decided not to try again? Were we admitting defeat?
We did everything we could, IVF, eating Brazil nuts and pineapple core and a bunch of other odd things. Or were we simply accepting that our path was destined to look different than the status quo.
At the start of things, I was okay with pushing my husband to use a donor but after cycle 6 it was like something inside me just clicked. It was a simple thought or maybe two thoughts:
If it hasn’t happen by now, will it ever? I mean in the time we tried to get pregnant once, 5 of our friends and one of my work colleagues got pregnant, 3 through IVF, 2 couple without any issues, and the other had a miscarriage but thereafter had a healthy baby.
What if we did another cycle with donor sperm, it worked, and I lost my husband due to resentment of him towards me and the child. Was I willing to loose the one person who meant the most to me for something that was not even guaranteed.
The answer to both of these was no and it was time to bow out and it broke our hearts. Our children who we carefully named, were not longed for this world and we now had to tuck them into our hearts so we could embark on a different journey.
I do not regret our choice. It has not been easy, I can’t go to baby showers or hold babies, and sometimes the grief kind of sneaks up on you out of nowhere. The yearning to be a mother will probably always be a little part of me. As time goes on it will be less debilitating. Some days I can see the good of not having kids, sleeping in and doing what I want, whenever I want. I even have to admit I am much better person after no longer doing IVF, of no longer being addicted to the hope it sells.
On the other hand, I am not always 100% sure who I am, or who I am supposed to be, if not a mother but I am on the road to finding out, and that will be my life’s adventure.
Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash