Why “Mama Nobody”?

In Africa, where I’ve been living for the past three years, married women are commonly referred to by the name of their first born. Mama George, Mama Wambui, Mama Esther… I remember going to a friend’s place and being turned out by her guard as I asked for Emily: her guard only knew her as Mama…

How to deal with life goals when dealing with infertility?

“The burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy” — Viktor Frankl

When living through infertility, the passage of time is traumatizing. Before Infertility (how odd…

Managing a team in times of infertility

“True leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed” — Sheryl Sandberg

I work on access to vaccination in Africa. Managing others is my favourite part of my job. Since January 2015, I have a…

As we lay waiting

I married you when I was twenty-six
Eager to get on with life,
To have new passengers join in the adventure.
We already had a name for them: “oursons”,
Plans to bring them around the world for a year
They would be three, and each would have
Their dad’s freckles and his foldable ears.

Why does the word “infertility” suck?

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. […] They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” Ursula K. Le Guin