Is the frustration worth the joy? This is something I have asked myself many times over the past 10 years. I often wonder whether I will be able to answer this question anytime soon or even at all. I have waited so long to become a mother, to feel those little flutters inside my tummy, to watch my tummy grow with every passing month. I’ve had this desire for more than 10 years and I’m probably the closest I’ve ever been to having a baby, yet I feel so far away from it all, I couldn’t tell you how or why I feel this way.
I’ve never liked waiting for anything, I was like that when I was little and I feel its probably only gotten worse as I’ve got older, we believe that the older we get the more control we inherit or develop and I couldn’t think of anything further from the truth. As we grow older, we are bound by timelines, bills, jobs and everything else that society dictates to us, do we ever admit that we are never in control of our lives and what happens. Waiting is torture for me and I’m not very good at it. When you want a baby, all Doctors say to you is ‘these things take time’, yes they do! I waited & waited, something we all know I am great at! Why is it if you don’t have a medical degree your opinion doesn’t matter or isn’t heard, I told doctors countless times that something wasn’t right, I already knew I had PCOS, I’d had it since I was 16, yet I was passed from doctor to doctor, nurse to specialist with no one really hearing what I had to say. Because this is the thing when you want something you have to jump through the hoops and when you want a baby those hoops are tiny little rings and there are hundreds of them, forget about being a human, from now on you’re a case number. I refused to learn mine, I didn’t want to be defined by a folder with my notes which explained all the reasons why I couldn’t have a baby, all the times Chlomid failed, all thirteen rounds of them, the time Ovarian Drilling failed, that time they flushed my tubes and found one was blocked but didn’t want to investigate it any further because apparently you can still get pregnant with only one tube, the time ICSI failed and nearly killed me, destroyed my hope, confidence, my faith in the NHS & lastly my marriage.
Life moves on, new dreams are dreamt, and new memories are made. I made mistake after mistake, but I learned who I was, what type of person I was and the kind of person I wanted to be. Distraction is key and is my secret weapon. I’m very good at distracting myself and I think its what every woman does when they walked the path I have. Fertility treatment sucks, it took 5 years of my life that I will never get back, and honestly, I don’t regret any single one of those years, I don’t regret all the treatments, my first marriage, the heart break, none of it. If none of that hadn’t have happened, I wouldn’t be where I am today, its not that everything happens for a reason, that’s not true. Things happened because I changed as a person, I no longer needed a baby or desired one. I moved away, I let go of my old life and started a new one. I became a better person for me.
But I fell in love and so did he. We had the most perfect wedding with our favourite people around us. Funny thing is when you set up home for the two of you, you very quickly start thinking about two becoming three. The spare bedroom would magically look suitable for a nursery. Now we know there are many ways to have a baby of your own these days, but I couldn’t put my body or my new marriage through fertility treatment, as a young newly married couple we didn’t have the money to go private at the time. We spent months searching the internet for different ways to have a baby and settled on Surrogacy. I knew nothing at all about it or how it worked but we dived in. Months later we were decorating a nursery in the hopes that our surrogate was pregnant with our baby. This was it, this was the closest we’d been to having our own baby, my own little baby. But lets go back to the fact that I hate waiting, I already gave up years of control and now I expected myself to let another woman carry my baby and do, think, act the same way I would if I were pregnant, this was asking a lot, maybe more than what I was capable of. Luckily after a lot of misunderstandings on how to do a pregnancy test it turned out she wasn’t pregnant with our baby. Why was I so relieved? So now I just had to stare at a ready-made nursey every day, I think I liked to torture myself slowly. What do we do now? Do we try again? Do we give up? No, we ADOPT!