Role: Contributing writer

As a contributing writer for Riposte Magazine, I wrote for the Agenda #1: Motherhood series.

Ninety-four houseplants and no baby

It wasn't meant to work out like this – making a baby. The game plan was supposed to be romantic, fun, full of matching underwear and weekends away, Prosecco-buzzed on some remote beach. It was supposed to just happen. But here we are, all fertility clinic appointments and acupuncture and disappointments. And we're not alone. Yet it feels so lonely.

Two years into our relationship, my boyfriend and I found out he carries the Huntington's gene – carries, not has – an inherited condition that attacks the brain. It's been our roadblock to parenthood ever since. Without ever trying to get pregnant naturally, we went straight into IVF with PGD – pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, where embryos are screened for the gene. So it wouldn't be passed on. We've always been in different gears in our quest to start a family. He was on the fence about even having kids. I'd always pictured myself popping out three by the time I was thirty-five. When treatment wasn't successful, he wanted time out to let the dust settle and heal. I wanted to go straight back into another round, full pelt.

Truth is, we hadn't prepared ourselves for it to not work, and processing that has been the hardest part. You can do everything right. You can want it more than anything. It makes no difference. The outcome isn't yours to control. Our consultants gave us a "perfect IVF patients" accolade. They said I was a "good responder" to the drugs, that we produced "good-looking embryos." But it turned out what we were really good at was rolling really shit dice. "You've just been incredibly unlucky," was all our consultants could offer when we were floored once more.

"What we were really good at was rolling really shit dice."

After five failed rounds, we realised we needed to take a fertility sabbatical. To breathe again, enjoy life again, love being us again. We swapped fertility clinic appointments for holidays, swapped obsessing about making a baby with buying yet another houseplant to nurture. We currently have ninety-four. And we've had a lot of therapy.

During this time, something shifted. Stepping off the IVF conveyor belt allowed us to build ourselves up again. The panic and the paralysis eased somewhat. I knew I needed to make something while not making a baby. I needed to turn this exclusion from motherhood into something positive. So I decided to build the platform that I longed for while blindly navigating our way through this fertility headfuck. A space for speaking honestly about struggling to conceive – the gut punch you feel hearing about other people's pregnancy announcements, the specific cruelty of those goddamn TFL 'baby on board' badges, the practicalities of IVF.

"Stepping off the IVF conveyor belt allowed us to build ourselves up again."

As a result, the co-creators is a collection of stories from those who've been through fertility hell and come out the other side – from IVF and genetic screening to sperm donors, egg donors, surrogacy, and adoption. The graduates. The people who have been there, done that, and successfully got their baby's sick all over their T-shirt. It started with stories from friends and friends of friends, but in time it'll reflect more diverse experiences of fertility struggles – from forward-thinking Denmark to cultures where infertility is completely taboo. By opening up the conversation, we can empower people with information and destigmatise the less conventional ways of making a family.

I found that while everyone's got a different story, there's a whole lot of stuff we share. Struggling to have a baby sucks in every language, relationship, and postcode. Sure, the logistics, the fertility options, funding, laws, and attitudes vary. But all that human stuff? It feels the same.

Somewhere in all these stories, my boyfriend and I found fuel to take a different approach. We decided to head to the US, as they're more advanced than the UK when it comes to fertility treatment. Now we've got two frozen embryos in Washington, DC. Two tiny possibilities sitting in liquid nitrogen, waiting. They might turn out to be our babies. They might not. We're planning an embryo transfer later this year, breathing deeply, rolling the dice again. This time giving them a kiss of luck first.

This article was first published in Riposte Magazine in July 2019. In April 2020, our daughter was born.