I never dreamed of a career or perfect wedding I just wanted to be a mom. From childhood I loved caring for my babies and planned to have a large family and be a stay at home.
I was 27 when my husband and I married in 2013. After a year of traveling around the country to all our friends’ weddings, we started trying. And trying. And trying. You know the gut-wrenching feeling, the whisper in your ear, the silent echo telling you something is wrong? The inner voice you know isn’t ‘just’ your anxiety. I knew something was wrong. I knew I should be pregnant already. My husband persisted everything was fine, and we just needed time for the pieces to fall together. However, I tend to lean on the hyper-emotional anxious side of life and insisted we go to the fertility specialist after 6 months.
They ran the tests. Took the blood. Poked and prodded me. And we waited. Until the follow-up consult, where they told us my husband suffered from severe male-factor infertility. The doctor told us the semen analysis had shown my husband’s sperm was extremely low in motility, mortality, and morphology. To be blunt, the sperm was slow, dead, and/or deformed. We would never get pregnant naturally. At this point, we were told our only chance of having biological children was through IVF with ICSI. This news was devastating. I was so young; how could IVF be our only option? But it was a clear plan, and we wanted a family, so we scheduled our first cycle.
Like all infertility newbies, you believe your first IVF cycle will result in a positive pregnancy test. It’s just awful enough, there is no way anyone would have to go through treatments more than once. The drugs, the needles, and blood draws, not to mention the emotional trauma. Everything was going according to the new plan stims, retrieval and now we wait for the embryo count. I will never forget the moment the doctor walked in the room and looked at us with eyes that could only mean my heart was about to break. She said, ‘I’m sorry. None of them made it.’ After that, I almost didn’t hear anything else out of her mouth. When I looked up, I read her lips: ‘They all died.’
We were told my husband’s sperm was too abnormal. It was like a knife was stuck into my chest, repeatedly. My worst fears were realized. The cycle that was supposed to give us our firstborn… failed. Our world collapsed. My dreams were shattered. I didn’t get out of bed for days. I had suicidal thoughts. I was lost. We would never have children together. At the time, I believed I would never be a mother. Losing the chance to conceive naturally was devasting but my husband gave me hope by suggestion donor sperm. after choosing a donor and trying again we had a successful cycle and welcomed our son in 2016 .
Our miracle boy. I was finally a mother! 2 years later, we decided we wanted to grow our family and transfer our frozen ’embodies’ which had been in storage. We would do a frozen embryo transfer, and it would be easy and far less invasive. Right? Unfortunately, with infertility, nothing is ever straightforward.
Within 6 months I had had one hysteroscopy and two failed FETs. And we were not only out of embryos, but our donor no longer had vials available. Again, I found myself feeling lost. Infertility will forever be a mindf*ck. Just when you think you have the answer, the rug is pulled out from under you. The old wounds resurface, the salt is poured in. Again, we were at a point where we would need to decide how and if we would continue to build our family.
Having made the decision to use a donor once before, choosing a second donor was not as difficult. While I initially hoped for children who were full biological siblings, we felt as if a second donor was not as big of an issue since they would ultimately have the same father. Two IVF cycles later we were pregnant again, with a baby girl due in March of 2020.
My second pregnancy was filled with heightened anxiety and fear. Fear of loss, genetic mutations, fear of death. And unlike my first pregnancy, I started seeking out support from other heterosexual couples using donor sperm. Surprisingly, there was very little support out there, but I happened upon a small online forum and connected with another woman using donor sperm. This was the first woman I had ever spoken with who was living with the complexities of male-factor infertility and we quickly become daily pen pals. And while I still have never met this woman, she is one of my closest confidantes and dearest friends. With this stranger, I have shared my darkest thoughts and fears around infertility and marriage. Hopes around motherhood and the cruel, unpredictable nature of fertility treatments.
This friendship made me realize how important it was to connect with other people in my community of donor conception. And how important it was not only for myself but for my children. I wanted to be a voice to help others like me who felt isolated in the realm of third-party reproduction. As a parent of donor-conceived children, I am passionate about transparency and being there for my children through all their social and emotional development around understanding their origins.
My journey to motherhood was hard but filled with love and today I am proud to be a mom of two donor conceived children. How they came into my life doesn’t matter they are meant to be mine and I am their mother.
