![]() This has been the hardest part for me in my head-&-heart space I am already a mother, even though it hasn’t happened for me yet. It’s an uncomfortable place to be – like being in a waiting room, but not knowing if your name will ever be called. It’s that constant feeling of ‘almost motherhood’, of being in limbo, neither fully here nor there.Ī lot of us in the trying to conceive community identify ourselves as a ‘mama-in-waiting’. There is also that continuous layer of grief that just lingers around during infertility when you are at work, when you are out with friends, when you are in Tesco, or when you first wake up and have a cup of tea. I was managing my hope and expectations then trying to pick myself up after the disappointment another layer was managing the hope and expectations of my family members too, especially my mum who wants this just as much as I do. As if all the pre-IVF naïveté wasn’t enough, dealing with the emotions of fertility treatment and the grief of failed cycles has been like nothing I have ever experienced. In 2020 we started IVF, and we have had 3 failed embryo transfers so far. Our male factor diagnosis challenged everything I had believed around our fertility, and it’s been a process of deep-rooted unlearning for me since then – unlearning the misinformation, the biases, the patriarchal idea of the man as supreme (common in African cultures), unlearning the shame, unlearning my identity attachment to the ‘black women are hyper-fertile’ narrative. As far as I was concerned, it was all my fault – his siblings all had children and I was the only non-Nigerian in the family, so it had to be me. It turned out that we had male factor infertility because my husband had been a dialysis patient for over 10 years.Īgain, at no point in my 2.5 years of denial and suffering in silence did I even consider that my husband’s medical situation could have had something to do with me not falling pregnant. What our fertility investigations revealed was another lesson for me in unlearning all the misinformation I had around fertility. ![]() And seeking help for pregnancy just isn’t something that is normalised in my community. I say all this to explain that seeking out help wasn’t even on my radar at that time – as far I was concerned, as a black woman I was going to fall pregnant naturally. When I casually said ‘ 2 and a half years’ she gave me a surprised look which said it all without her speaking a word - and after further probing offered to refer me to the Gynae clinic. I said ‘ no, but we are trying’ and then she asked how long we had been trying for. While I was there a nurse asked me all the usual questions, and then asked if there was a chance that I was pregnant. Then one night in April 2019, I had this sudden pelvic pain that was so excruciating I had to go to A&E. Coupled together with the ‘black women are hyper-fertile’ narrative, I felt an incredible amount of shame that my body was not doing what it is supposed to do, and that kept me silent and alone. Around me everywhere, all the women I knew seemed to be falling pregnant very quickly. But at no point did I even think about seeing my GP, or speaking to anyone about it. And one of them actually informed me that I had an ‘abnormal cycle’ – measured against data the app had from other users.Īnother year came and went – and still no baby. I mean I had always known I did not have a period every 28 days but the apps confirmed this for me in a crystal clear manner. I used several apps, and all the new-age trying-to-conceive gadgets I could find, but the only useful thing that came out of that was finding out that I have very irregular periods. We got married but still there was no baby, so I decided to turn things up a notch. Of course, I didn’t realise then that this imagined worst-case scenario would in fact become my reality years later. I knew then, just as I know now, that the one thing I wanted more than anything was to be a mother - and so as a way to protect myself from disappointment perhaps, I imagined a worst case scenario. I remember being 14 years old – obviously I had no baby ambitions then – and thinking that I was going to have difficulty having kids. ![]() Looking back, I often wonder whether I spoke my journey into existence. ![]() I’m a 32-year-old Zimbabwean-Brit and my story began in 2017 when my husband (boyfriend at the time) & I decided we wanted to start trying for a baby. But I know how cathartic is it for me to write, and I know even more how helpful it might be for someone to read my story, especially as a black African woman. It’s been a while since I sat down to write about my journey, and I must admit, I have been putting it off out of the fear of revisiting the pain and disappointment. Noni Martins is a project manager from Southport, and hosts the Unfertility Podcast
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