Are we ready for some non-medical stuff? Okay!
I had a month and a half between my egg retrieval and my embryo transfer, and I was actually thankful for this break to have a little more time to drink and be irresponsible, because who doesn’t love that. During the in-between time, I was on birth control pills to let my ovaries chill out after they did all that work. So I figured I’d also give you a break from the hardcore medical stuff to talk about my experience making this choice, how I was feeling, etc.
A past me probably would have made the joke that “feelings” is the grossest part of the experience, but it turns out, getting older has taught me that recognizing, acknowledging, and talking to others about your feelings is a good thing. Plus, again, part of IVF involves a surgery that puts a needle through your vagina so there’s a lot of contenders for “grossest part.”
I’d be lying if I said this was easy. There are parts of it that were easy: after I got started with the right clinic, the process has gone really well, for which I’m incredibly lucky. Choosing to go the single mother route was an easy choice for me in the abstract, but that doesn’t mean it was easy, generally. As I’ve mentioned, I spent several months crying daily and wishing I had someone, anyone who would help me go through this. It’s a very lonely experience and you also feel like something is wrong with you for not being able to find a romantic partner — everyone else has been able to do it, so why is it so hard for you?
The process is also just so involved, as evidenced by the fact that this is blog series is eight parts so far. With IUI, I wanted someone to go to my appointments with me and hold my hand and drive me home after and sit on the couch with me and think good thoughts. With IVF, there was so much information all the time and I really wanted to tell someone about the experience just to process it all. Thankfully, I have some very good friends who wanted to know every detail.
(If you’re wondering how you can support a SMBC friend — that is it. Put their appointments in your calendar, text them after to see how it went, cheer them on every step of the way.)
However, it’s more than just the procedures. Here is a rough list of the specific emotional challenges for me, and what I might tell someone in my shoes. It’s not all of my anxieties, because that would be exhausting, but it’s a good chunk. To be honest, I still struggle with most of these, so I’m afraid my advice is not necessarily the best, but I’ll work on giving better advice as I have better answers.
The hardest part was prioritizing having children over having a relationship.
For a long time, I was hoping a relationship and having children would go hand-in-hand. However, as I got older, I didn’t know if I could have either one, and I had to make a choice on which one to prioritize.
I think what it came down to was what I had experience with. I’d been trying to have relationships and had been “unsuccessful” — it felt like that definition of insanity, that I was doing the same thing over and over again and somehow expecting a different result.
On the other hand, having children was a complete unknown — in fact, I didn’t even know if it was something I could do. I thought I would have trouble conceiving because my mom did.
Opting to have a child on my own significantly narrowed the dating pool for me. I still dated during the process of IUIs and IVF, because I wanted to find a partner (and to be honest I was holding out hope to find someone similarly motivated — I didn’t *want* to do this alone). At first, I was upfront with what I was doing, but after lots of rejection from that, I stopped dating for a while because it was too hard to keep hearing you’re not on the same page. Later, I decided to keep things more casual and not explain my situation until it became absolutely necessary. It’s not an easy thing to talk about, and it’s hard to have someone reject you, however nicely, for something you’ve been working toward for years that stirs up a lot of feelings for you.
To be clear, I don’t blame any of those people for opting out. I absolutely would have if the situations were reversed somehow. But, it was hard to face if I was starting to like someone.
People would also tell me that if I met the right person, they would support me having kids on my own. To be blunt, hearing this did not help and would make me angry. Think about how difficult it is to meet someone acceptable to date under normal circumstances, then throw in a giant life complication/change like having kids. I’m sure the possibility of finding someone while doing fertility treatments is not zero, but given how much rejection I faced, it’s pretty fucking low. It felt like I was trying to mourn something I couldn’t have and these people were not listening to me or were being Pollyannas while I was trying to figure out the potential realities of my life without a partner.
It was hard enough facing what I expected to be difficult challenges alone, but accepting the potential for that to continue for the rest of my life was paralyzing. I’m a pretty independent person but I’m still a romantic and I like being in a relationship — I feel safer going to sleep with someone else, having someone to text throughout the day, go grocery shopping with, and all the other little parts of a relationship. I’m okay being on my own for long periods of time but forever? That seems…sad.
What I would tell someone in my shoes: It’s okay to grieve. You’re free at any time to change your focus during this process. However, if you’ve made your choice to focus on having children, remind yourself of the reasons for that. (It’s not going to stop it from hurting.)
It was very hard to not think something was wrong with me because everyone else could do this.
No matter how many times my therapist tells me there’s nothing wrong with me, I feel like there is. Jerry Seinfeld joked that 90-95% of the world was undateable — yet, it felt like 90-95% of my friends were married. How was I the only outlier? I had no problem getting people to date me, but there had to be some reason no one wanted to settle down with me.
Was it all the dumb dating decisions I made when I was younger? It felt like other people made worse decisions and still ended up with someone who promised to love them forever.
Was there something physically wrong with me? Was I bad in bed? Was I emotionally immature? Was I too much of a romantic? Was I not accommodating enough? Did I need to move?
I could play this game forever but the unfortunate truth is I don’t know why I’m still single. As much as I know I’m not perfect, no one is — and imperfect people still find a way to make a relationship work. And yes, I also know that not everyone will get married — but that doesn’t make it any easier.
I also felt a lot of shame that this is what I had to resort to. Like, I couldn’t find anyone to love me so I had to do it on my own.
And that’s just finding a partner. Once I did three unsuccessful rounds of IUI, it was harder to look at pictures of happy families and wonder if that was something I wasn’t going to have.
What I would tell someone in my shoes: No one is perfect, so while you can work on improving yourself, there’s not going to be a magical point at which you have achieved enlightenment and now qualify for a long-term relationship. You have avoided several bad decisions when it comes to relationships, and that’s an important skill to have. Be glad that you’re not doing this with someone who sucks. You are strong enough to do this on your own.
It was hard to let go of life events I couldn’t have. (In particular, having children with someone I loved.)
This was something I didn’t think of until I started trying to get pregnant on my own. Even if I did eventually find someone to be with long-term, there is a fairly significant chance our love could not produce children due to my age. That was a tough one. It feels like it even further narrows my dating pool to people who could accept my child but would be ok with not having children with me, and it also just feels…sad to not be able to produce a child from this hypothetical lifelong relationship.
There are other, more stupid milestones I think about that I won’t get to have. I’m not going to get to have a bachelorette party, because it would be impossible for all my friends to get away from their kids and anyway, their bedtime is 9 p.m. I dropped any hopes of having a big wedding because it doesn’t feel realistic. Plus, I have to find someone to want to marry me to do either of those things, and the chances of finding that feels very low.
Are both of these things frivolous? Of course! Does that mean I don’t want them? No!
On a larger scale, I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not find a life partner. I still wouldn’t say I’ve “accepted” this — I do still have hope, but I’m trying to be realistic and think about what my life will look like without a partner and with a child — and it’s a tough balance.
What I would tell someone in my shoes: Focus on the things that life has enabled you to do and be grateful for them.
It’s scary to think about doing everything on my own.
My friends complain about having to take their toddler to the store without their husbands — and that’s going to be my entire life. Once again, my fears of doing everything on my own, ranged from the mundane — How am I supposed to get around in my house alone when I’m nine months pregnant and my movement is restricted? — to the frivolous — Who is going to take my bump pictures? — to the actually quite concerning — What am I supposed to do when I go into labor?
Not to mention — what if I want to date again? How do you even begin to go about doing that when you’re solely responsible for a small human?
What I would tell someone in my shoes: It’s going to be hard, but people have done this alone, and you can too. You can do hard things. Lean on your support network as much as you can — they want to help you.
All that said, it was only marginally hard to know this was the right choice.
Whether or not this is true, I genuinely felt that if I wanted children, the time to start was immediately. It was very important for me that any children I had would get to meet and have memories of my parents — not to mention I would need to lean on them for help — and watching my parents grow older gave me a clear timeline. I know they wanted me to meet a life partner too, but that was something I didn’t have control over — whereas I could at least try having kids on my own.
So, waiting until I was 39 or 40 to start trying to have children wasn’t an option for me.
Does that mean I didn’t question if I was doing the right thing? Of course not. Ending one of the best relationships I’ve been in because he wasn’t sure if he wanted kids was terrible. Even after I started doing IUIs and IVF, there were times I needed a break because everything was overwhelming and I actively did not want to be pregnant. I still don’t want to do it alone, and if this entry sounds sad, it’s because I am sad about it. But, I know that with all of the options, I made the best choice for me.