By my third birthday, I knew exactly what I wanted my destiny to be – motherhood.
As just a toddler myself, my ambition was not to become a wife or career professional (both of which I am today), but to become the healthiest and happiest mother I could be to my very own baby.
Whether this was the result of the perfect communist upbringing where women very firmly had their place or a consequence of being raised in an environment where love was rationed and had to be earned, I was clear – my only chance of experiencing unconditional love would come from a child. My child. Whom I already loved.
Born in Russia, I grew up in a family with a firm belief that education and success were non-negotiable. My father, a strict man, told me as a teenager that I was to travel to England and attend boarding school to gain a better education in order to build a better life. I remember protesting my parents’ decision, but it didn’t change the outcome. I was to leave my friends, my family, and the country I called home.
The first few months in England were incredibly hard. I barely spoke the language. I was lonely and afraid most of the time. The pressure to perform academically weighed on me daily. I felt lost. I remember crying… a lot. Calls home were sparse, but they were my only lifeline each week as I gathered up my loose change for the school’s payphone.
There I was, a teenager in a foreign country trying to fit in – to be “normal”.
But it wasn’t this that was going to challenge my ability to be ‘one of the girls’.
As teenage girls, we assume there will be a number of “invitations” that grant us entry to womanhood: our first periods, our first sexual encounters, making choices between pads or tampons.
I remember not being overly worried that my period hadn’t arrived at 14 years old, but I was curious. My mother echoed that she was a “late starter”, and her mother (my grandmother) was the same. Still, what was the harm of seeking medical advice to put my worries at ease just to be on the safe side? It’s odd to think of it now, knowing the practicalities women encounter through menstruation, I was actually looking forward to getting my period! I wanted to feel the cramps, select period products and understand the ovulation process to conception! It wasn’t about “bleeding”, it was about knowing that I was on the right track to make a baby, when the time would finally arrive.
But I didn’t have a first period, and I’ve never had one since.
“‘We have the results from laparoscopy. You have Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome. It means you were born without a uterus. It means you cannot carry a child. You also have an undeveloped vaginal canal, which means that you will never get your period because there is nothing connecting your ovaries to the outside. You cannot get pregnant naturally, and you won’t be able to carry a child or give birth. You will not be able to have sexual intercourse without first having surgery or other treatment.”
In a heartbeat, my world shattered. At 16 years old, I was diagnosed with MRKH – Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. This is a condition which affects roughly 1 in 5,000 females. A congenital condition where the development of the female reproductive organs is affected, resulting in the absence of a uterus and varying degrees of underdevelopment or absence of the vaginal canal.
Not only were my dreams of carrying my own baby over, but I was also informed that if I wanted to have sexual intercourse, I would require intervention in the form of vaginal dilation therapy.
My choices were explained to me as follows. Option one was to have surgery. Surgery meant scar tissue, so sex was likely to be painful and eventually the vagina would collapse, requiring further surgery, which would lead to more scar tissue, a cycle that would need to be repeated again and again until sex would become simply too painful to endure. Option two was dilation. Dilation was, at the time, a very new treatment, and results were not yet well documented. Overall, it seemed like a better option. Dilation meant no surgery but ‘simply’ stretching the vaginal canal by applying pressure via what essentially looked like dildos. This was a gradual process which required time and dedication.
I decided to try dilation. I figured that if dilation didn’t work, then surgery would still be an option. I was given a bicycle seat on wheels and the very first size of dilator, which was slightly larger than a pea. The idea was to place the dilator in the opening of the vagina and then sit on the bicycle seat for two hours using my body’s natural weight to apply pressure. The plan was to dilate for two hours every day for two weeks. Every two weeks, I would return to the hospital for a check-up and to, hopefully, swap the dilator for the next size up.
Return trips to the hospital meant I had to walk past the maternity ward every time, as that was the only way to the gynaecology department. Every time, every trip, surrounded by the reminder of what I could never have.
The thank-you cards at the nurses’ station feature smiling baby faces. I so wished I never had to go near that part of the hospital, that there was a way to avoid reminders about ‘normal’ development and pregnancies and babies.
Every two weeks, I was back in the hospital. I ‘only’ had to endure that for another eighteen months or so. In eighteen months, I should reach the optimal size. Just one thousand and ninety-two hours of saddle-sitting.
I wanted to give up, but giving up was not an option. Not being able to have a child was bad enough but if I wasn’t able to have sex then what life would I have? You see, in my teenage logic, sex equated to love. Isn’t that what we see in books and on screen? If I couldn’t have sex then would I ever be loved? What man would want to be with a woman who can’t have sex?
Alone, devastated, and broken – I had to carry on both with my studies and with making a vagina behind closed doors.
For two hours every day, I was now confined to my bedroom. My bedroom in the boarding house. Finding two hours meant either trying to fit that in between finishing school and dinner (just about a two-hour window) or after dinner. Given that I usually used the time before dinner to do my homework, this made sense – I would still do my homework, but instead of using a chair, I’d sit on my bicycle seat. And that worked to an extent… As I moved up the sizes, the pain got worse and worse and managing to sit for two hours became more and more difficult, never mind trying to study at the same time.
But with my steely determination that has become the pillar of my entire life, it finally paid off.
I had a vagina and… my very first boyfriend.
Losing my virginity was not romantic like the movies suggested. It was clinical and painful. It was, however, my first taste of womanhood, and I wasn’t going to let a diagnosis stand in the way between men and me. Because I needed to have sex to maintain the “upkeep” to ensure my vagina maintained its length.
Shame was hot on my tail. I was spiralling in ways I ensured were invisible. I was desperate to find a place I could call home, and it didn’t matter how much I believed I would find this in the men, I didn’t. My emotional GPS was flagging up error messages frequently, error messages I chose to ignore. Radically assessing my existence as a woman, I hoped and naively assumed contentment would come from men. Unable to create a family of my own, I spent years chasing love and acceptance, resulting in me getting married to a man I hardly knew after just 6 months of dating. I wanted to feel wanted, to feel special so I ignored the red flags and my dad’s advice.
I didn’t yet know that I was swapping one abusive relationship for another. For me getting married was not only ticking the social expectation box but it was a step on my journey to motherhood. Since I could not become a mother the “easy” way, I still had the option of surrogacy or adoption. But neither are straightforward and both are easier if you are married (easier from a bureaucratic point of view!).
Then, I heard breaking news.
I will never forget the day I heard the UK announcement that a London hospital was seeking participants for a Uterus Transplant clinical trial. A uterus transplant involves removing a uterus from a donor and transferring it to someone who has absolute uterine factor infertility (AUFI). AUFI is a condition in which you’re unable to get pregnant because you don’t have a uterus or it isn’t functioning. A uterus transplant may make it possible for you to become pregnant if you have AUFI.
Could this be my chance of having a baby?
An actual baby I get to make, carry and birth?
In 2015, I received an email. An invitation to apply to become a candidate for the UK uterus transplant trial. For four years, I went through tests, scans, consultations, hope, setbacks, more hope, and more waiting. And a divorce (and that’s a story in itself).
And then came the biggest delay of them all – COVID.
As time passed, I felt like my chances of getting to the point when it would be my turn were getting slimmer and slimmer.
And then I met him: my person, my soulmate who would eventually become my second husband. But life, as it does, had another plot twist waiting for me.
Infertility is often framed as one person’s diagnosis.
One problem.
One explanation.
But sometimes it’s both.
In our case, it wasn’t just MRKH.
Two people who found each other, both wanting to be parents, both learning that biology had other plans. There’s a strange irony in that.
And now I had a decision to make. We had the choice to continue with the trial using a sperm donor but it wasn’t just that. I had already been through IVF previously and I knew what to expect but what I had to consider now was that a womb transplant was major surgery. With risks. And the risk didn’t end with the surgery. There was the potential for organ rejection, the cocktail of immunosuppressants which I’d need after surgery, the embryo transfer and the attempts at pregnancy. The eventual caesarean and then the choice of repeating it all again or having the womb removed. There was a lot of risk to consider. On the one hand, I had the lifelong dream which could become a reality but on the other hand I finally found love which was a reality. Was I prepared, was I ready to risk it all for a “maybe”?
And the truth is that if I was even 5 years younger I would have said yes and I would have carried on but I was standing on the cusp of a perimenopause. My body was already starting to change. Yes, I was fit and healthy but I was no longer “young” not in biological terms and this meant that my risk increased exponentially.
I had to make one of the hardest decisions of my life: to withdraw. Suddenly my chances of becoming a mother shattered for what felt like the second time in my life.
Adoption or fostering may still be part of our story. But for now, we’re learning to live the life we have. Not the one we imagined.
Childless, not by choice. Still full of love, meaning… and possibility. Sometimes the life we didn’t expect becomes the life we learn to love.
For a long time, I was ashamed of being different. Sure, I felt a sense of shame around what I had to do to my body. But I’ve felt ashamed of my “womblessness”; the infertility battleground where I, like so many others, find themselves in the trenches of.
I’ve felt ashamed of:
My accent.
Being a foreigner.
Being a woman without a womb.
My bushy eyebrows.
Being too loud. Too intense. Too much.
So I tried to blend in. Until I realised something important.
The things I once tried to hide are the very things that shaped my life.
Different doesn’t mean broken. Sometimes it means power.
And when you stop apologising for who you are, you find your tribe.
When I heard the groundbreaking news that a baby boy, Baby Hugo, had been born to Grace and her partner, Steve, my stomach dropped. I felt a loss, a grief I couldn’t quite explain. But no sooner had I wiped the tears of my own experiences, than I felt a purpose bubble up inside of me – to reach out to Fertility Network UK and ask them if there would be a place to share my words.
Instantly, they agreed, and I am so grateful to the team at Fertility Network UK for giving me this platform to share my story. The work they do to educate, support women, and advocate for choice among the fertility-challenged is nothing short of brilliant.
Healed and inspired, I continue to reclaim my voice, knowing that love is an inside job, available to anyone seeking true freedom. Within communities, like the one I’ve found with my fellow MRKH women and Fertility Network UK, the future for so many is less alone.
The world requires all types of women, mothers or not, the world needs nurturers, leaders, healers, community leaders, and storytellers.
The world needs kindness and the gentle touch of a woman who never quite got her family. The world needs stigma shakers and taboo breakers from women who have only known silence to be socially palatable. The world needs hope.
Today, I don’t feel alone; I feel empowered and excited about what life has in store for me next. And that makes today a pretty great day to be alive.
Thank you for reading my story, and I hope you find your own version of freedom, whatever form that takes.
If you are struggling with MRKH or know someone who is navigating an MRKH diagnosis, seeking support and awareness, please visit MRKH Connect here.
To learn more about Natalia’s book and purchase your copy of I Don’t Matter: In Search of Home here.
About the author
Natalia is a solicitor specialising in franchising who helps her clients make their dreams a reality. In addition to her legal practice, Natalia owns a photography franchise offering photography workshops across Lancashire for anyone looking to develop or improve their photography skills.
Originally from Russia, Natalia came over to the UK at the age of 14 and attended a school in Bournemouth before going to Warwick University and spending a year in Germany, before eventually settling in the North-West of England. Natalia was diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MRKH) at the age of 16. She is an active member of the MRKH community and a passionate advocate for raising awareness of the condition.
An animal lover, a musical enthusiast and a keen runner, Natalia is always up for a challenge, from the Yorkshire Three Peaks to the Manchester half-marathon.
Having first-hand experience of clinical depression and later burnout, Natalia is a strong believer in talking therapy and breaking social stigmas relating to mental health. Her motto is: “life is too short”, and she certainly doesn’t do things by halves.
I Don’t Matter: In Search of Home
From the outside, she seemed to have it all together – bright, driven, endlessly resilient. But beneath the composure was a girl who learned too early to survive by staying silent.
In I Don’t Matter, Natalia Shvarts traces her journey from a Soviet childhood to a life rebuilt in the West – a story of cultural dislocation, of never quite belonging, of being a foreigner in more ways than one.
When a life-changing diagnosis of MRKH shattered her sense of self, she was forced to confront what it means to be a woman, to find purpose without motherhood, and to rebuild her identity from the inside out.
Raw, unflinching and deeply human, this memoir explores love, loss, mental health, coercive control, and the long road to self-worth. It is, above all, a story about what happens when survival becomes second nature – and what it truly means to heal, forgive, and finally take up space in your own life after believing for so long that you don’t matter.
Today, Natalia writes from a place of safety, acceptance and hope. Her message is simple but powerful: Be kind to yourself. Accept yourself. Love yourself. You matter.
Praise for I Don’t Matter: In Search of Home
A captivating, raw, heartwarming, and uplifting memoir about the power of grit and tenacity, and one woman’s quest for love, belonging, and unconditional happiness. I read it in one go! – Ally Hensley, author of Vagina Uncensored: A Memoir of Missing Parts