Writing is my therapy but also my downfall, because once my words are out there the damage is done, the pain inflicted and the realities I’ve been trying to mask are laid bare in all their ugly glory.
A situation I found myself in, which I’m still kicking myself over, is having told a bunch of people back in March/April that by the time they saw me in October I’d be fat and pregnant.
Instead, they saw me. Fat, yes, because I eat my feelings now, but pregnant? Negatory… in fact, if it’s even possible, I’m “less” pregnant than before with only one functioning ovary, which is one less than when I made that grandiose prediction.
But hey, I at least have a job now… so on the scale of miserably failing at being an adult human, I’m slowly crawling towards the right end finally. However, with said job, I’ve experienced the joy of having semi regular breakdowns thanks to hormone treatment whilst simultaneously being denied the sick leave I need to take, to go and make a baby. I am reminded in harsh hues of shitty brown red, that no sir, I can’t just go make a baby with my husband late at night after one too many wines. I, in fact, need permission from my male boss, to go and have time off to get two rounds of PRP and one insemination in one month.
Now, he rightly, under Australian law, can refuse me that leave, and so he did. Instead of calling the clinic to tell them “hey sorry to fuck you around again, but turns out I actually can’t do this month”, I hid in my shame and anger and Instead completely forgot (or something) to tell them and instead deflected it to my husband to handle. Why?
Because the whole fucking thing is so incredibly dehumanising that i just decided to not. To not deal with the reality that now my reproductive system is even more out of my hands than it what before, that now I have one more gatekeeper and that it shouldn’t be this fucking hard to make a baby.
It’s been my approach to friends who have had babies recently. Instead of reaching out and saying, I can’t wait to meet them, I just straight up stick my head in the sand. Apparently my new approach to life is to just isolate myself from everyone and everything when it all gets too much. The thing is, I know I will have to apologize to those people one day, but I just can’t right now because it all hurts too much, even if it only crosses my mind for a split second.
It hurts so much that the only way for me to navigate through this right now, is to look into adoption. Because my thoughts are at least that’s a potential solution. I can’t do IVF for another three or four or five or fifteen rounds. I know my husband thinks I can, and has even stated he almost expects me to, but I can’t. I have so fucking little say as to what goes on in my body during this process that I feel I should at least have the right to say “no, I’m done” when I feel I am. Not when a doctor says I should, or a family member tells me to keep going, or anyone says “it’ll happen”. No.
No one is actually addressing the reality here, which is it probably will never happen. It’s a new realisation offering me clarity and in same ways, resolve to just accept it all, and focus on what that means for my future.
The thing is, everyone thinks in this day and age, Pregnancy is still an option. That medicine has come so far that it’s guaranteed one way or another.
But it’s not, it never is. And for some people it won’t.
When I first found out I had endometriosis at 19 and it became a possibility of being infertile, everyone said “cross that bridge when you come to it”. Same thing at 25 diagnosed with PCOS, with some added “stop worrying, it’ll be fine, these days you’re so lucky with medical advances… “
Well now I’m 32 and being infertile for 4 years has left me realising that I actually need to accept that it may never happen. This is the new normal. Me never becoming a mother naturally.
Adoption is something I’ve always been open to, and while in Victoria they advertise it is “free” to adopt a child (whatever that means), what they don’t tell you until you dig further is there are less than 20 available children for adoption each year. Less than 20… so essentially in terms of even becoming an adoptive mother, I probably have about the same chances as I do suddenly growing a human in my own womb.
Which lead me to where I have been mentally for a while. I will most likely never become a mother in any sense of the word. Not a mother who conceived naturally, not a mother who carried via IVF and not a mother through adoption. Yet no one seems to want to admit or accept it. I guess perhaps they don’t realize I have reached this conclusion and I have accepted it.
And yeah it fucking sucks and I hate it, but it’s genuinely something I need to get used to. Because I can either spend the next ten years trying and failing and feeling miserable, or I can start adapting my future to fit in with this new reality. I need to learn my worth, my value and my contribution to society outside of what I thought that would be, by being a mother.
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