When fertilisation turns to creation

I have been absent. Not in my own life, there I have remained sometimes more present than I would like. IVF dangles the opportunity for parenthood like we are all so many horses chasing a carrot. In my case, the carrot often becomes more than I can chew. So…it has taken time for me to mentally realign myself and be in a place where I feel able to give of myself back to this community I am trying to build.

I want you to know that you are not alone.

I want you to know that the hard-ness of this limbo-slash-purgatory that is IVF mirrors much of the hardness both before and after your journey with it is done (whether in success or failure). But that doesn’t mean this in-between space it is not worth every ounce of your time and energy.

To that end, I would like to introduce you to my daughter, Summer Rose.

She is the reason that this group exists.

She is someone I have longed for, imagined, spent countless hours researching for, and am now utterly exhausted looking after and trying to figure out the enigma that she presents me daily.

I’m mindful this image despite the arm’s-length happiness one can feel for a fellow warrior of the IVF variety) may feel difficult to look at. Or as they call it in modern times: triggering.

I think it is ok to look at difficult things and sit with it. It is also ok to disconnect from those difficult things when it is too much. So wherever you’re at emotionally right now, don’t force yourself to be anything other than you are.

Since she was born I have felt I am a wave being thrown against a cliffside, over and over and over again. My husband has suffered from (at times) severe post-partum depression. So the sense of happiness I had hoped to feel in the completion of our family has very often been replaced by despair in being unable to help him.

My now four-year old son also struggled (understatement). It was through Summer launching us all into three months of inconsolable crying whenever she was awake that he was buffeted against the same rocks I was. Sufficed to say, this was not the experience I had with baby number one. We have so very little (read: NONE) control over the temperaments of the little souls who are called to be our children.

And in my son’s case the complete dysregulation of my daughter led to severe dysregulation and behavioural issues in him. I couldn’t look after the two of them alone because he would attempt to stomp on her, grab her; every few days her face would have a long scratch on it from him managing to gouge her. My mother-lion was unleashed more than once, only to be broken against the endless fields of guilt that awaited me. It has taken months but their relationship is a gorgeous blossoming of friendship and exploration.

Our son still needs support in kinder and other environments and so I have been pursuing funding from the NDIS for things like paediatric OT, speech pathology in pragmatic communication and play therapy (it’s an Australian government initiative called the National Disability Insurance Scheme). The scheme is in the process of funding reductions but while it remains, we are applying for assistance under their developmental delay pathway. He is an intelligent, beautiful young boy, with sensory processing difficulties and so his big feelings are felt more keenly than the average child of his age and his increasing physical strength makes his expressions of that (sometimes hitting, biting - especially during transitions from one thing to another) all the more testing. I am in a constant state of needing to learn, of needing to regulate my own nervous system, of questioning whether I am cut out for this insane job of motherhood, and wondering how on earth my mother did it with four children - my admiration for her is higher than it has ever been before.

While I continue to remain “full-time-mother slash provider slash mental health manager”, I am trying to carve out time and energy to revisit this world of IVF again and assist anyone who is brave enough to keep going in the face of enormous, often age-related challenge in creating viable embryos.

To that end, and because my time is so incredibly finite and limited, I am also investigating how I can best use AI to manage memberships and to assist with some comments (especially those answering things that are in the guides I’ve created). But in the spirit of building a transparent community I will always be open about how I use AI with you. I don’t ever want it to take your trust and your companionship in this little space we have here for granted. And AI will NEVER write these posts for me because in another life, I am a writer and I cannot stand anything that AI writes, 95% of it is trash and void of all human experience, emotion and beautiful flaws!

In any case, none of my family difficulties are shared here with the purpose of dissuading anyone from their journey into or through parenthood. Far from it, the experience of parenting is transformative, challenging and a very steep learning curve that unlike IVF cannot be distilled into numbers. It is a job you cannot give up, cannot walk away from and will not always love (and may even sometimes regret), but it is one that will change you in ways that you cannot begin to imagine.

What I do want my story to say though, is that there is always more to a photo. More than just happiness at the end of any IVF journey. As in all life, there is immense joy and love, there is sorrow, there is pain. And so it continues.

Much love to you all wherever you’re at.

Michelle xoxo