In Utero
Day 0–197
“Imagine yourself, a year from now, looking into the eyes of your newborn baby. Would it matter how this child came to be yours? Would this baby be any more or less your child, whether born of your egg, by adoption, or born through you, but by donation of another woman’s egg? Would you have greater or lesser love to share depending on how this child arrived in your arms?”
Questions like these are reserved for women like me. Women, who began their journey to motherhood with so much hope. Believing deep down that a strong desire to conceive would necessarily translate to a healthy pregnancy. Women, who at one point in time had every confidence in their body’s readiness and ability to create, and who now have to work desperately hard to continue to love their body in spite of the ways it has let them down. Women, who more than any other, understand the true miracle of their own existence.
The miracle…
that one, amongst millions of her father’s sperm, found its way to an egg traveling from her mother’s ovaries through her fallopian tubes, and there where they met, this sperm fertilized this egg to create an embryo. 23 and 23 chromosomes, from each her father and mother. This embryo that then continued to travel to her mother’s womb where it…where she…, found a place to implant and grow into a fetus, and eventually into a fully developed infant, alive and healthy at birth.
As with much of life, my own path to motherhood continues to be shroud in mystery.
Two years ago, when I first began to seek the counsel of a fertility psyhologist, I couldn’t get beyond the tears that came with learning that my own tubes were blocked beyond repair. And while I felt no hesitation jumping to in vitro fertilization, I felt trapped, believing that I now had only one way to have my child. Though I was of course aware of the other ways, I couldn’t sink my thoughts into these options. My heart would hurt at the thought of my child being of anything but my own DNA. I felt that the mere act of considering these other options would take away from the energy I needed to put into believing that IVF would be successful.
That word: Success. So grippingly tethered to outcomes and timelines. The high of my body’s successful response to the stimulation hormones. The celebration after learning that the chromosomal make up of the embryo we created made it viable. The elation of becoming pregnant.
And when the vision doesn’t materialize, when success evades, a sense of failure prevails. The day I began to bleed. News of our miscarriage and the complications and surgeries that went along with it. Several more disappointing attempts at IVF.
When I started down this journey I believed that there were limits to what I could endure. First, the idea of not being able to conceive naturally with my husband scared me enough that I prolonged seeing my doctor. Then, the thought of not having a healthy pregnancy with our first IVF attempt was intolerable. And then a certainty that any further failures at subsequent IVF attempts, would break me.
All of my worst fears came to be.
Each loss left me in a deeper state of heartbreak. And yet, at the same time, each loss also me broke me open. In the midst of the darkest days, I continue to look for light. Through despair I seek solutions and devise ways to turn my desire to have a child, into a reality. When the story of how it’s gone thus far, is suffocating me, I take a deep breath to remind myself that the only thing about the future that truly exists today, are the stories I tell myself about it.
And so, on good days, I expect miracles and I allow myself to feel the deep love that I have for the child I don’t yet know.
It’s not a matter of positive thinking, rather a will to keep living and to keep trusting that I will soon understand how the union with my child is meant to unfold.

