This Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about my own journey to motherhood. Do you have friends who can basically get a wink from their lover and then – Bam! – they’re pregnant? Yah, that was so not me.
In my twenties, I used every type of birth control I could find because becoming a mom felt at least five (or maybe even ten) chapters ahead in my life. It wasn’t until the age of thirty that a young doctor asked me if I wanted information about freezing my eggs. I was actually shocked by the question because in my most basic understanding of human biology, I calculated at least ten more good fertile years ahead of me. I was 100% confident that as soon as I could find the right guy, get married, and hit my career goals, I could drop the birth control and get pregnant right away. Wow, was I wrong!
Five years later, I had married the love of my life and felt I had earned enough life experience to be a mother. Within three months of “trying”, I found out I was pregnant and thought to myself, “See, that wasn’t so hard!” I loved being pregnant and knowing I was growing a human, even if I couldn’t share it with the rest of the world. I felt empowered and ready to start the next chapter of my life as a mother. A few weeks into the pregnancy, I woke up in excruciating pain which turned out to be a miscarriage. I was devastated. I was now a mom with empty arms. The following Mother’s Day was heartbreaking in a way I never imagined.
After a few months, we started trying again, this time with a renewed fervor. I religiously charted my BBT at the exact same time every morning and produced impressive graphs that proved I was ovulating every cycle. But, my cycles were short and after consulting with a reproductive endocrinologist, I learned my cycles lacked enough progesterone in the luteal phase to sustain a pregnancy. Upon hearing that news, I accepted his prescription for the infamous Clomid, the gateway drug to assisted fertility.
Then I got down to business. I read every book and blog I could find about getting pregnant. I received acupuncture treatments almost daily. My husband and I took Chinese herbs that tasted like a mix of dirt and grass. I followed Oprah’s advice and created an elaborate vision board of what motherhood meant to me. It was intense and exhausting trying to keep up with all of these daily rigors of fertility awareness and sustain hope in the process.
Fast forward two years and we had run a gamut of assisted fertility treatments ending in shattered dreams. Our grand finale was handing my body over to science and investing in the grandmother of all fertility treatments, IVF with ICSI. After harvesting only a handful of viable eggs, the fertility clinic prepared us for the worst. Of the eggs collected, only two matured into viable embryos. We transferred them both and kept our fingers and toes crossed during the two-week wait for a pregnancy test.
The stakes were high… it was our last chance to become biological parents and my last chance in this lifetime to get pregnant. Since our immediate family and friends had never been down the same path and offered a mixed bag of support, I found empathy and solace in an online tribe of women experiencing the same journey. We were all in it together 24/7, exchanging baby dust (wishes for a successful pregnancy) like it was a real currency.
It’s now been four years and despite receiving an extremely low beta pregnancy test after IVF, my beautiful girl defied expectations and stuck with me to arrive earth-side exactly 39 weeks after conception. She is a flawless mix of my husband and me, full of his sense of adventure and infused with my humor. When I look back at all we went through, I can’t imagine my life without her in it. I do still wonder what it would have been like if we had conceived her naturally without the endless nights of tears and prayers. But, with her arrival, she gave me the ultimate gift. She made me a mother.
