What Four Cycles of IVF Taught Me
How to cope with infertility struggles and thrive in the process
It took us eight years before we had our son. We had gotten married, expecting to get pregnant with ease. I wanted to enjoy a year of no children, just us in our partnership in a new country.
Then our peers started getting pregnant in the first year of our marriage, then the second year, then the third. I began to wonder — what was wrong with me?
When I finally had my son, many roller-coaster years after tying the knot, I wrote a cathartic piece about my journey (the tale will appear in a collection of fertility stories compiled by Deborah Habicht later this year). But that’s a story for another day.
I had become the busy mom I had long wanted to be and started writing about it as I stumbled through motherhood.
And yet even after finally becoming a parent (through our second attempt at IVF), infertility still came back to haunt us.
Breastfeeding and Assisted Fertility
Hints of more trying-to-conceive trials, second child around, began to present themselves six months after the birth of our long-awaited little one. It had been a prolific (also sleep-deprived and overwhelming) period of breastfeeding when my doctor informed me that if I wanted to conceive again, I would need medical intervention and a period of at least two months of having weaned my child off the breast.
I know that my doctor was just being real and looking at the numbers. I also knew she wasn’t demanding that I quit breastfeeding my child then and there. She was stating facts.
But that brought me to tears.
Why would I rush to quit breastfeeding, when I had fought so hard to get here? Why would any clinic try to take this precious experience away from me, when the world was teaching me that this close contact with my child was so important?
I was finally a mother, the thing I had ached for for so long. I could breastfeed — this was a triumph. (Yes, okay, the sleep-deprivation that came with it was another issue with consequences and their corresponding solutions).
I also had this dream that maybe, once I had finally conceived and brought a child into the world, that my body would finally know how to do this thing that had remained so elusive to it, and conceive. Naturally. The way most couples did.
I decided I wanted to have a full breastfeeding journey till my boy turned two. No one was making me wean my child at six months. My doctor was merely warning me what it would take, from a medical standpoint, to conceive with the clinic’s assistance. It didn’t need to be that instant. I wanted to enjoy my chance to breastfeed my child for as much as he needed and I wanted.
Reaching out to the world and telling stories while my son was at my breast, napping, became a great outlet for me as a writer and new mother, particularly during my son’s first year of life. Then he learned to stand on his own two legs and toddle through a playground. That was the end of my relationship with my phone and social media. Or at least, running after my son before he fell off a see-saw or ran into someone else’s bicycle became more urgent than being on my phone to promote my latest poem about motherhood.
Mama Milestones
In the midst of all that were milestones headed towards why I write this story now, about infertility, even when I had finally joined the ranks of motherhood.
I was able to wean my son from the breast shortly after his second birthday and then we got through potty training. We started our journey of separating from each other, securely and slowly, when I chose a play group for him to join for two mornings without me. It was difficult work for both of us, but I could see we were growing. I was giving him permission to discover a world independent of me and start building his own relationships.
He could learn German, the majority language in northeastern Switzerland, where we live, and pick up new things from his caregivers and the other children at play group — things I might not be able to teach him alone.
Then it was time. My partner and I had not yet managed to conceive by the time the little person was weaned, so we visited our fertility clinic again.
We had another frozen embryo from the IVF cycle that had led us to our healthy baby boy, so we started there. It meant lower costs and would be less invasive. It did still involve injectable hormones and a lot of time at the clinic that felt like a day job. But my partner and I were ready for that. Our little boy’s time in play group helped.
The Dead of Winter
This procedure resulted in a negative pregnancy test — the embryo transfer had failed.
We opted for a fuller work-up of things next, involving my age as a woman over forty, and reflecting the new laws in Switzerland that allowed a measure of genetic testing called PGT-A.
After weeks waiting with bated breath for the results, rejoicing in one embryo making it through ICSI then genetic testing, we had news. Sure, we spent Christmas stuck at home in the dead of winter (we usually traveled someplace sunny), but there was a promise of new life coming into our home.
Shortly after the new year, we had another embryo transfer, resulting in a detection of HCG levels — we were pregnant! But the HCG levels were low, and kept dropping as the famed TWW or Two Week Wait came to a close. Despite our microscopic superstar making it through so many tests in the lab, it still didn’t stick around for life. It was a baby that couldn’t be.
The fourth IVF of my life
With a broken heart and a bruised pelvic floor from all the injections, we tried what would be the fourth IVF of my life (I’m surprised to look back and realize I’ve braved it through that much of these).
One embryo started crumbling apart immediately, and the other that survived started deteriorating by Day Six in the lab, when it would have been considered for PGT-A. It saved us a few thousand dollars, being spared the genetic testing. But we were broken-hearted with significantly thousands of dollars less in our bank account, and no baby to show for it. My body felt battered, my heart even more.
How could this be, when we had successfully conceived our little boy?
The path to healing
This entire experience was forcing me to look at what I didn’t have. And in my journey to healing, which I was determined to go on, I found that I needed to shift my focus to what I already did have.
A repaired marriage, that had once been through a lot, including a few months of separation, during our initial infertility struggles.
A healthy baby and a successful breastfeeding journey behind me, a bright boy who had become our joy, and was becoming his own person. We had fought so long and hard for him, how could I stop seeing him, truly, in the here and now?
The privilege to get to write was a gift.
Parents who were alive and well enough that we could argue and speak with them. They had time to spend with our son and could help shape him into the person he was going to be.
But how do you get over your dreams being dashed on the rocks, when you’ve left your heart bleeding all over that petri dish in the lab?
After a lifetime of institutions and pop culture teaching us about the pitfalls of getting pregnant too early, I was not prepared for the opposite — years of my married life staring me in the face, childless.
Childless, not childfree. I was certain, I was clear I wanted a family, and a partner to raise them with.
It’s another hurdle altogether for those who are childless not by choice — those people are brave and wonderful and can offer a wealth of advice on how to live well when life throws you unexpected curve balls.
What’s next?
I was basking in the joys of finally becoming a mother, eager to meet and make mommy friends and swap birth and breastfeeding stories. But when those fledgling mothers I started out with soon started getting pregnant and having their second babies, it became another emotional journey.
You’ll go through a brief period of thinking, why not me? What’s wrong with me — again? But because you’re finally a mother, you would have gone through that strange, wild journey of finally learning to appreciate your body.
You will thank your body for pushing this life out, and for being so much stronger than you imagined. You embrace your body and stroke your belly and say, thank you, and give your body the permission to heal after birth.
You amaze at this life-giving substance that is breastmilk and marvel at how your body can produce it.
So how do you survive assisted fertility that comes after a first child, and how do you face that, if you’re in your forties, the dream for a second child might not happen?
Or what if you are grieving after a stillborn or a miscarriage? Such loss is not as evident to the rest of the world. You are mourning the life of a person that couldn’t be, that no one had ever met. But you had, so richly, in your imagination, in giant expectation of having this little person become a part of your life. And they never got there to hold your hand and gurgle at you. Such grief must be allowed and acknowledged.
I say, write it out. Grab your journal, the one that is not meant for other eyes, where you can be incoherent and unfiltered, and write. Write to that Baby Who Couldn’t Be. Write a letter of mourning.
Have a glass of wine and treat yourself to a macaron.
Accept what is. And instead of being busy living in the past that you no longer have or living in a future you do not own yet (whether that involves a miracle baby or an adopted child, or none of the above), what about just being here?
You’re alive, you get to enjoy being a mother to one, and you also get to enjoy some freedom in rediscovering bits of your non-mama self, once that little one is out of nappies. You get to have a partner and loved ones who want to be part of this little person’s day’s on earth. There is so much we are already given.
Go for a walk in the sunshine. I love that saying, Solvitur ambulando — it is solved by walking. Each step brings you closer to peace and healing.
I’ve heard that happiness is not an outward job, but an inner job. There is that peace that lies within us — and I’m not saying go and manufacture it. Let yourself mourn if assisted fertility didn’t work out.
Depression and Mourning are sisters who insist on joining us for tea on many an afternoon, for certain chapters of our lives. This is one of those chapters. And if you don’t let them sit with you from across the table and entertain them, they will never leave.
I believe that letting them have their time with you is best. When they feel they are done with you, they will take their leave of you. And you can go back for a walk, without that heaviness hanging over your shoulders.
Yet others who have experienced great loss have told me that grief may also never leave you, you just learn to carry it with you. So be prepared when wisps of bereavement resurface amidst the most innocuous setting.
Maybe you’ll take the doctor’s outlandish advice to use a donor egg, instead of your own, maybe you won’t.
