Episode 14
Was I prepared for the outcome of not having a baby?
Today I'm answering this question from Anonymous...
"I’m currently doing IVF to become a solo mum and while I’m super hopeful and optimistic it will work out, the realities are starting to dawn on me that it may not. And I may have to make peace with that at some point. So I guess my questions are - Did you think about this? Did you have a limit on how many round you would do? How did you handle the IVF rollercoaster once you decided you were ready to be a mum? Do you know anyone who tried without success (because this needs to be normalised as much as solo motherhood imo)?"
I was 42 when I had my daughter so if there was one thing I was definitely across and that was the fact that, at my age, becoming a mum was more unlikely than it was likely.
Every fertility appointment I went to (and there were a lot of them) I was reminded of the statistics.
So I knew, no matter how much I wanted to be a mum, there were absolutely no guarantee it would happen.
This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wangal people, of the Eora Nation.
I pay my respects to Elders past and present.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Host: Rachel Corbett
Editing Assistance: Josh Newth
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Transcript
Hello, welcome to the show.
Speaker A:Today I'm going to answer a question from Anonymous.
Speaker A:These are the questions that I love.
Speaker A:Because you don't want your name attached.
Speaker A:Anonymous says, hi, Rachel.
Speaker A:I'm so glad you're doing this podcast and look forward to listening every week.
Speaker A:Well, thank you so much, Anonymous.
Speaker A:I love that you are here listening every week.
Speaker A:I'm currently doing IVF to become a solo mom.
Speaker A:Yes, girl, you.
Speaker A:And while I'm super hopeful and optimistic it will work out, the realities of IVF are starting to dawn on me that it may not totally get that and I may have to make peace with that at some point.
Speaker A:So I guess my questions are, did you think about this?
Speaker A:Did you have limit on how many rounds you would do?
Speaker A:How did you handle the IVF rollercoaster once you decided you were ready to be a mom?
Speaker A:Do you know anyone who tried without success?
Speaker A:Because this needs to be normalized as much as solo motherhood, in my opinion.
Speaker A:Okay, that's probably enough for now.
Speaker A:First off, I don't know anybody who this didn't work for.
Speaker A:I know plenty of people in partnerships that this has not worked for.
Speaker A:I know plenty of people in partnerships that have honestly gone through more rounds than I would have done if I were them.
Speaker A:And I am absolutely in awe of just the resilience and the perseverance.
Speaker A:And look, maybe I might have done that many rounds, but yeah, some people just go through the ringer on this and it really is an incredible.
Speaker A:That's just an incredibly impressive thing to see people do when they want a family so much.
Speaker A:And you just think if they get to that eventual point where they have it, those kids or kid is so lucky to be in that environment where they were wanted that much, you know, just so magic.
Speaker A:But of course I was 42 when I had my daughter.
Speaker A:So everybody's telling you that it's not going to happen for you.
Speaker A:There is no secret that this is probably not going to be your path.
Speaker A:So I definitely thought a lot about that.
Speaker A:My main thing with this and with life in general, I think is that I just do not like to have regrets.
Speaker A:However, I'm practical, I'm a realist.
Speaker A:And I am also very sort of attuned to my own wants, needs, whatever.
Speaker A:So I think I've said in a previous episode around whether you are ever really ready.
Speaker A:And I do believe you can absolutely get yourself to the point where you are ready.
Speaker A:And I do believe I got myself there.
Speaker A:Just took me a damn long time because I wasn't in a relationship And I can understand when you are in a relationship and you've got somebody else there and you both want to do it together, it could be a lot easier to say, you know what, let's just do this and work it out together.
Speaker A:When you are by yourself, you have to think about, can I afford this?
Speaker A:Can I do this by myself when I have no family, no support?
Speaker A:Is this actually going to be something that practically I am going to be able to handle on my own?
Speaker A:There is a lot more that you need to process and think about if you do not have support there.
Speaker A:That means that in my mind I had to come to it in my own time and I was taking a little longer than most people around me would have liked.
Speaker A:So I got it.
Speaker A:But I really was, during that time and even before the time that I started to kind of try and get my mind into the IVF stage, I had frozen my eggs.
Speaker A:I froze them twice.
Speaker A:I had a number in my mind of what I wanted to get to.
Speaker A:I am very lucky that I have polycystic ovaries.
Speaker A:Didn't feel lucky when the doctor told me that, I thought, oh, no, what does that mean?
Speaker A:But actually it feels like a.
Speaker A:Of a superpower because you just have more egg reserves than you should at your age.
Speaker A:So I was lucky enough that I was still able to produce a decent amount of eggs at my age.
Speaker A:Now, if I could have my time again, even though I checked my fertility probably before my mid-30s, and I was very lucky, right?
Speaker A:I got to that point where I had more reserves than I should have had for my age.
Speaker A:So then I went through the process after I split with my partner of egg freezing, to making, to make sure I had stuff in store there.
Speaker A:And I went on my way, but had a doctor's appointment and they had told me, you are pretty much not going to give birth or you've gone through early menopause or any of those things could have happened.
Speaker A:So I was really lucky that I ended up with the outcome that I would.
Speaker A:So if I could have my time again, even though it worked out this way for me, I would get on top of my fertility in my 20s.
Speaker A:And it's certainly something I'll be talking to my daughter about and I am going to offer her, if she would like it, as a 21st birthday present.
Speaker A:So make freezing, because then that just takes the foot off the gas.
Speaker A:Mum will pay for it.
Speaker A:Mum will pay for the storage of it, providing mum's not broke at that point and everything hasn't gone belly up.
Speaker A:Maybe I'll retract that comment if I get to the point where I can't afford it at the time.
Speaker A:But I wish that I had done it in my 20s.
Speaker A:I mean, I don't think I could because I actually don't think it was possible when I was in my 20s.
Speaker A:I think it might have still been exclusively for people who were, you know, cancer patients.
Speaker A:And then you could do it for medical reasons.
Speaker A:But I think that I wouldn't have been able to do it much earlier than I did.
Speaker A:So I feel very, very lucky that I was even able to freeze my eggs and that I was in that phase of my life at a time when the science was there and we were able to do that feels like a real privilege.
Speaker A:But now that it's able to be done, I think getting on top of your fertility and doing that early, because young eggs, that's what you want when you're older, you want those young, fresh eggs.
Speaker A:So I would have really like to do that if I had my time again.
Speaker A:But I was lucky with the alpolycystic ivories.
Speaker A:Very, very grateful for those.
Speaker A:So my main thing before I got to the point of getting my mind into the right space for IVF was let me do everything that I can to make sure that if this takes me a while to get my head around, I've got the things in place that mean that I can give myself at that point the very best chance of this working.
Speaker A:And then if it doesn't work after I've gone through all of this stuff, then I think I know myself well enough to be confident that I would be able to say to myself, you could not have tried any harder to do this.
Speaker A:The only thing I could say to myself was, you should have done this earlier.
Speaker A:But I also knew that that would have been a dumb thing to say to myself, because there's no way, if I went back in a time machine to me at 36, 37, 38, that I would have wanted to have a kid.
Speaker A:If I'd had a kid at that time, yes, I would have loved it, but I just wasn't ready.
Speaker A:So I am pretty good at understanding myself and also being able to deal with the facts.
Speaker A:What I can't deal with is regret.
Speaker A:I think that's very, very hard to get a handle on because you can't do anything about it.
Speaker A:And all you wish is that you could turn back time.
Speaker A:So when I frozen my eggs, I knew I have done the version of an insurance policy that is available to me right Now, I had a decent number of eggs.
Speaker A:Any fertility specialist I talked to and I went to multiple, multiple appointments because I was meeting different fertility specialists to find the right one to go through the IVF process.
Speaker A:I had more bloody internal ultrasounds than I can even count.
Speaker A:And every time I would find a specialist and have an ultrasound, there was always, your follicles look really good.
Speaker A:Yes, you've got a great number of eggs on ice.
Speaker A:Everything was pointing in the direction of you have a decent insurance policy there.
Speaker A:So when I eventually got to the point where I was ready, my thinking was, OK, okay, I'm @ the age where this is probably going to take two to three years.
Speaker A:So I'm going to try with my fresh eggs.
Speaker A:I've got all of those eggs on, on ice.
Speaker A:I don't want to use them if I can use my fresh eggs.
Speaker A:At that point, I didn't know whether I wanted to have more than one child.
Speaker A:You also don't know you could have 50 eggs on ice and they all might be duds.
Speaker A:You know, it's no guarantee.
Speaker A:It's just like, have I got enough there?
Speaker A:That probability says, I think there might be a kid in there, but you can only do what you can do.
Speaker A:You can only do what your body can do.
Speaker A:I could only produce what.
Speaker A:So I went with fresh eggs and I was just lucky that it worked.
Speaker A:And I sat down with my boss 13 weeks after the embryo was implanted and I said to him, I'm about to have a conversation with you that I thought I would be having with you in two years time, but I'm pregnant.
Speaker A:So it worked in a way that I was not expecting because I had set myself up for this being a really long journey.
Speaker A:I did not go into this thinking I am guaranteed a child.
Speaker A:I did not go into this thinking that just because being a mom has been something that has felt like it has been ingrained in me since I was really young.
Speaker A:I felt like I've known in my heart I wanted to do it.
Speaker A:I felt like it would be the one thing I'd be really good at.
Speaker A:And I felt like I really wanted to give it a shot.
Speaker A:But not through any of those feelings did I think to myself, this is definitely going to happen to me and if it doesn't, it'll be unfair because I know how it works.
Speaker A:It's nothing to do with fairness.
Speaker A:It's all to do with biology and it's all to do with chance and luck and all those kind of things.
Speaker A:So I was very, very clear mentally on the fact that I only get a baby if this works.
Speaker A:And so all I can do is do my very best to give myself that insurance policy, get my head in the right space, and then the rest is just down to whatever.
Speaker A:It's down to whatever you believe in.
Speaker A:And I was just lucky that at the end of that process it resulted in my daughter.
Speaker A:And certainly I had a lot of, you know, frustrating thinking during that period of getting myself ready, where I was like, why aren't you ready yet?
Speaker A:Like, hurry the hell up.
Speaker A:Like, you do not have time.
Speaker A:And when I met my daughter and through the whole process of us being together, I just.
Speaker A:She is so my person.
Speaker A:She was the person that was meant to come to me.
Speaker A:And I'm like, okay, I did this at the time.
Speaker A:That was right for us.
Speaker A:This is right for me.
Speaker A:I'm a better mom now than I would have been to her three years ago.
Speaker A:And this was the right time for us.
Speaker A:So that's kind of how I got my head around that whole thing.
Speaker A:I am really into dealing with facts.
Speaker A:You know, I just feel like if you have the facts in front of you and you are making your decisions and trying to build your emotions around that, I get it.
Speaker A:We get swept away and things.
Speaker A:I am guilty of that at times too, for sure.
Speaker A:Definitely.
Speaker A:And listen, if I was nine rounds in to trying to have this baby, I would have a very different perspective and a very different outlook.
Speaker A:So I appreciate that.
Speaker A:But all you can deal with is the cards that you are dealt.
Speaker A:And so that is just what I focus on.
Speaker A:I cannot judge myself nor measure myself by anybody else or how it has worked for them, because my body is different, my life is different, everything is different in my world.
Speaker A:So all I can deal with is what's in front of me.
Speaker A:So that's always what I've focused on.
Speaker A:And in terms of the IVF journey and the process of that, I don't know whether it's because I had done half of it, really twice already, freezing my eggs.
Speaker A:So I'd done all the injections.
Speaker A:I remember the very first time I did the injections, I was definitely scared.
Speaker A:I was planning to actually go into the office of the fertility clinic on the first injection to get them to inject me because I was really nervous about it.
Speaker A:And then the reason that I didn't was because my first injection was due at 7 on a Saturday morning.
Speaker A:And I was like, am I going to get up and go into the city to do this?
Speaker A:Like, just get yourself together.
Speaker A:Pinch your fat and Put the needle in there and get over it, because you got to do this 57 more times, so we can't be whizzing into the city every time.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker A:So I had a bit of a tough talk to myself, and then we were like, actually, that sucked.
Speaker A:But it is what it is.
Speaker A:And in my mind, it was always just the path to get to what I wanted to do, which was freeze my eggs to have that security.
Speaker A:And I know it's not a guarantee, but it was a sense of security for.
Speaker A:And it was something that I really wanted to do.
Speaker A:And I was really happy when I had those things put away and stored away that I had done it.
Speaker A:So I didn't really feel, I don't know, negative about the IVF process.
Speaker A:Even through the egg freezing process.
Speaker A:The first round, I did really feel out of sorts, but I kind of, in my mind was like, well, I'm putting a lot of weird drugs in myself.
Speaker A:Like, I'm supposed to feel out of sorts on the second round that I did for the egg free.
Speaker A:I was really conscious of the fact that I felt really out of sorts in the first round.
Speaker A:And I had been very stressed, been a lot going on in my life.
Speaker A:And so I was really actively meditating, trying to take a step back, really trying to focus on just being healthy and doing, you know, the best that I could and creating an environment in my body that was the best sort of possible environment to this for this to happen.
Speaker A:And that process was.
Speaker A:I think I got less eggs, but I was just so much more calm and chill through the whole thing.
Speaker A:It didn't even really feel like there was anything going and going through me.
Speaker A:And then the whole process through ivf, like, yeah, there's a nice feeling to get an embryo implanted.
Speaker A:Nah.
Speaker A:But are you gonna do it?
Speaker A:Because it's the.
Speaker A:What you have to do.
Speaker A:Yeah, you know, all of those things.
Speaker A:There's nothing terribly fantastic.
Speaker A:Was childbirth great?
Speaker A:Not really.
Speaker A:But are you gonna do it?
Speaker A:Because that's what you have to go through to get to the other side.
Speaker A:So, yes, bits of it sucked, but I didn't really allow myself to get wrapped up in it because it's just a part of the process.
Speaker A:It's what you need to do to get to the other side.
Speaker A:And so that was kind of my outlook on the whole thing.
Speaker A:And I'm just very grateful that it has meant that I've ended up with a kid that I love very much and that I like hanging out with and who seems to be a very nice person that I want to get to know better.
Speaker A:So I really do wish you the very best of luck.
Speaker A:It is a full on journey to do on your own.
Speaker A:I hope you have support around you.
Speaker A:If you don't have family support, you know, find those friends and people around you that you care about that care about you that you can lean on and talk to.
Speaker A:You know, I think sometimes for me that's the bigger thing.
Speaker A:You know, there's a lot going on, but sometimes just having somebody to talk to the old therapist was great.
Speaker A:From my perspective.
Speaker A:You're paying somebody, they have to turn up for an hour.
Speaker A:Doesn't matter how many times you tell them the same flipping story, they have to listen to it and they have to give you the best advice they possibly can.
Speaker A:So I can't recommend that highly enough.
Speaker A:I truly found that really valuable through that entire time, even though she was telling me to hurry up.
Speaker A:But you know what?
Speaker A:I got.
Speaker A:I got it, I got the message and we got there eventually.
Speaker A:So thank you so much for your question.
Speaker A:Anonymous I really do wish you all the best with it.
Speaker A:And yeah, thank you very much for listening to the show and I hope that at the end of this process you end up with a little human that you feel really just grateful to have in your life.
Speaker A:So good luck with it.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker A:If you have a question, you can always submit it via the link in the description of this episode.
Speaker A:If you are enjoying the show, please leave a review.
Speaker A:I would love to know your thoughts on it and I will see you next episode.
