It is hard to describe what being told you can’t carry your own child feels like.
When you are told essentially as a child yourself suddenly you are faced with a feeling and emotions you aren’t ready for and have no idea where to start to process this.
You really aren’t prepared to have to handle such big news. This has never even been mentioned as a possibility that could actually happen. Everything you are taught starts to seem a lie.
At aged 17 I was diagnosed with MRKH a condition affecting 1 in 5000 women. To put it very simply it means I was born without a womb.
I had always grown up thinking I would have children. I was one of those girls who played happy families with her friends and dolls and named the children they hoped they would have. I was not unusual but I never knew really what caused people not to carry their own child.
Our society and education leads us down a path of what is ‘normal’ yet we are not well equipped to understand that there are other reasons people can’t have children. Even 20 years on things have improved and there is some more exposure to fertility challenges yet support can be limiting at an age where there is so much pressure to fit in.
So at the age of 17 I thought I was a freak. I felt isolated like I was not good enough for anyone and thought I would never be happy.
As I would come to learn, about 1 in 8 couples have fertility issues. Many of which are never shared publicly. They are considered taboo, they are sensitive and they are so very emotive. Naturally people don’t often like to share their pain.
I spent much of my twenties worried I was running out of time to find the route to having a child. I knew it was going to be harder for me than for others and I hated it. I hated feeling like I was different and angry that I was in this position. The constant feeling of ‘why did this happen to me’? It forced me to think about things I wasn’t ready for but felt I should be and it made me panicked and anxious that I was not where everyone else was.
I was 26 when my boyfriend and I started really talking about the future and what that might entail. We talked about the various options and decided to explore a route of IVF surrogacy. It felt like so many steps and such a long process with complexities in it that we needed to understand. Whilst we had expected it and knew it was hard to get funded support for an IVF route that needed surrogacy we were knocked back and appeals were returned with often unclear and unhelpful responses. More and more I grew angry at a process that just felt so unfair.
It all came to a head and it was clear my boyfriend and I had hit a point where we weren’t communicating. We were tip toeing around the subject. Too scared to talk about it and really tell each other how we feel. We distanced ourselves from it and from each other until in the end as much as we cared for each other it wasn’t enough anymore. I look back now and I can see we weren’t ready as much as we wanted to be. The fear of time looming drove forward a decision that we weren’t truly aligned on. It left us both heartbroken.
It was after this that I suddenly realized my feeling of loss and rejection and fear was in part related to me not truly accepting MRKH and the impact it had on my life. Not acknowledging the impact whilst also not allowing myself time to consider that we don’t have to do what it felt like ‘everyone else’ was doing just to feel normal. What is ‘normal’ anyway?
I learnt about grief. I learnt about the trauma of a diagnosis like MRKH and what that really meant from a psychological perspective and how I had buried that feeling for so long. It was a grief for a child I could not carry myself and may not have at all. It was a strange feeling and something I had not considered I needed to do. I had been ‘dealing’ with MRKH for nearly 15 years by this point yet had never really truly accepted it and opened myself up to the acceptance of it that I always thought I had but had not allowed myself to reflect on.
It took this big moment in my life to recognize I needed more support and returning to counselling at this stage was the best decision I ever made. I personally could not recommend counselling in some form more highly it has helped me at different stages of my journey but this time I actually let myself feel. I let myself open up and be less guarded. I was reminded that I was so concerned about the future I was forgetting to live in the present.
I had to take a step back. So I did.
I learnt how to live in the moment. That it was ok to be patient. That not everything has to happen at once. That there are so many ways to be happy.
More importantly I reflected on why I wanted to have children and over time I actually decided if I didn’t have children then that was ok too.
I am now 36 my life has changed a lot, for the better in the last few years. I have a supportive boyfriend and children is something we are so happy to have in our lives through god children, friends and nieces but actually I can now very confidently say that I am very happily childless.
MRKH advocate & Director of MRKH Connect charity