How to mix career ambitions and infertility?
‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Mike Tyson
I had always been ambitious. Career-oriented. I wanted to make full use of my expensive education by making some sort of impact. At the risk of sounding corny, I wanted my life to matter in making this world a better place. Moving to Kenya I took a job on half of my previous salary, but professionally I felt I was following the words often misattributed to Mark Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Having heard Sheryl Sandberg’s calls to “Lean in”, I even wanted to become a manager before having a child. That was B.I. (Before Infertility –new dating system for my main life events).
Sheryl Sandberg advocates for maximum control over one’s careers plans: “I recommend adopting two concurrent goals: a long-term dream and an eighteen-month plan”. “The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately”, she writes.
But how does one have a long-term plan when the biggest project of all -having a family — is TBC? How to have an eighteen month plan when each month brings its roller coaster of treatment options and disappointments? When one doesn’t know if one year from now, one will be still hanging out in hospitals or finally raising a baby?
What infertility did to me was to take away my sense of control over my career. Has my ambition plummeted? Perhaps morphed would be a better word. I’ve now been in the same team over three years and in the same position for two, when previously I’d get itchy feet after 6 months. I’m not considering switching right now, even though there is no obvious “promotion” for me ahead.
The main factor constraining my ambition? One can’t start a new job spending every other day in a hospital. The trust from my boss and team that I can still do my job correctly are irreplaceable, and I feel too lucky to swap them. But I’ve also seen the benefits in staying longer in a role, contributing to the long arc of change, and take pleasure in another series of firsts: the first time I see Anna doing a complex Excel table or Camilla presenting in a passionate manner at a conference, etc.
Sometimes, it’s those closest to you that try to restrain any little bit of ambition you may have left. One issue with having a demanding job is that friends and family who are aware of my infertility issues regularly ask: “Do you think if you took more time off work, that would help? What if you stopped travelling all together?” But work can actually be a relief in times of infertility. My job has actually been extremely helpful in giving me something else to think of besides my empty uterus for at least nine hours a day. Never once in the past three years have I not slept well due to work stress. Invariably, when I have had nightmares, they have been about infertility.
And this is despite a huge irony: The whole content of my work is a cruel reminder of my body’s shortcomings. My main objective at work is to increase the number of surviving infants in Africa, by introducing new vaccines for newborns. This means I get to see cute babies on pretty much every work document I come across. But I have grown immune to this, and somehow I still believe in my organization’s mission. Having a team waiting for me continues to motivate me to get up in the morning. Even after a disappointing ultrasound.
