In 1963, my parents moved into a rental house in a dodgy inner-city suburb. My two brothers were four and three years old, and I wasn’t to come onto the scene for another six or so years. My Dad had been in a terrible accident a few years before, when he was hit and run over by a car which resulted in extensive injuries including a shattered pelvis. Because Dad’s injuries meant he couldn’t work for months on end, my parents plans to buy a house in a nearby street went out the window, and after living with my grandparents for a while, they eventually moved into the rental in William Street.

It was a tiny, two bedroom workers cottage, with a verandah at the front, a kitchen with a  wood combustion stove, an outdoor laundry and toilet, and a huge yard with a palm tree in the middle. If you walked near the base of the palm tree the dirt would sink a bit beneath your feet, as the tree was planted where the house’s well had originally been, when it was built in 1900.

When I made my surprise entrance into the family in 1969, a bit of reshuffling had to be done to fit me in, which ended up with one of my brothers sleeping in a tiny enclosed entrance-way at the back of the house, and baby me in with the other brother. The house was not insulated, so we lay in pools of our own sweat on stinking hot summer nights, and shivered our way through winter nights with hot water bottles doing little to keep us warm. The combustion stove was replaced not long after I was born with an electric stove, which meant the only heating was from the tiny open fireplace in the lounge room. We three kids would all vie for pole position in front of the fire, and over the years also had competition for space with numerous cats, a Doberman, and even an orphaned baby kangaroo. On Sunday nights in winter we would have jaffles for dinner, which would be cooked in a jaffle-iron over the open fire. I can still taste my jaffle of choice – ham, cheese and pineapple – and still feel the third degree mouth burns I’d get from the scaldingly hot pineapple juice.

In the mid 1970s a massive storm obliterated whole sections of the city, and our house was badly damaged. The verandah at the front was closed in, and my brother and I had a bedroom at each end, with a wardrobe placed strategically at each side of the front door to afford us some privacy if someone came knocking. I remember the excitement of having my own space for the first time, with the particular luxury of a power point right next to my bed. In the rest of the house, there were only four power points – one in the lounge room, one in the kitchen, one in the main bedroom, and one in the laundry. Everything was powered from those three single points by a series of extension leads and double adaptors, so to have a power point of my very own was nothing short of wonderful.

As great as the power point was, the toilet was still outside, and when I was about six my parents started refusing to escort me at night, thinking I was now old enough to walk the five steps from the back door to the loo and back on my own. I wasn’t scared of the dark when I was indoors, but as soon as I set foot outside I was terrified. I developed the ability to pee with such rapidity that if it had been an Olympic sport, I would have been sent off to represent my country as a urinating child prodigy. The toilet itself was also a bit scary because it was of a very old style – the cistern mounted high on the wall, with a chain that you pulled to flush. Early one Sunday morning as I finished my constitutional wee and yanked down on the chain, the whole cistern came off the wall and narrowly missed taking me out as it fell down onto the dunny seat. I can still remember my father mumbling under his breath as he came out to investigate how in the hell a 6-year-old had managed to break the toilet at 5am on the one day of the week he got to sleep in.

By the time I was around eight, both my brothers had grown up and left home and so I took possession of a whole room of my own, complete with a doorway and an actual door. A couple of years later the owners of the house decided to sell, so my parents took the plunge and decided to buy it. They were both blue-collar workers, and in the late 80s and early 90s, mortgage interest rates climbed up around 17%, so rather than renovating the house, they concentrated on not losing it. Over the years, the house had bits and pieces done to it, but all by dodgy mates of my Dad who’d work on weekends for beer, or my Dad himself who was neither particular nor proud when it came to his own handiwork.

Just as the interest rates came down Dad became seriously ill and had to have a kidney removed, and on the back of that was made redundant. Owing to my mother’s working of double shifts in hard, physical jobs and money managing ability, they managed to keep the house and pay it off, but it began to fall to rack and ruin as they couldn’t afford any repairs. This continued for 20 years, with things only being repaired or replaced if they became dangerous. Despite this, my Dad loved this house with all his heart, which broke into a thousand pieces when he was taken away one day in an ambulance and was told he would never return.

53 years after my parents moved into the house in William Street, my Mum still lives there. The house is not comfortable, or probably even safe, especially for an elderly lady, but there is a magic about William Street, and the people who live there, that make her want to stay. In the past half century, the suburb has been gentrified, and her tired old tumbledown cottage sits amongst tastefully renovated homes occupied by professional families with children who attend private schools. But she is surrounded by the familiar, and the neighbours are incredibly kind and generous, and look out for and after her. Earlier this year she contemplated moving, because she cannot afford to fix the house, and whilst she made all the right noises when we visited modern brick retirement villages on the other side of town, her heart wasn’t in it.

I was at a loss as to what to do. I wanted my mother, a woman who has never had very much at all, to enjoy whatever remains of her life. She would learn to like living in the retirement village, and would make friends and maybe go on a day trip or two. She wouldn’t have the neighbours dog to pat (or chastise when it barks), she wouldn’t have the lady next door taking her to the supermarket every Friday, she wouldn’t be able to swap oranges from her tree for eggs from the neighbour’s chickens. She wouldn’t be the older neighbour that everyone kept an eye on, who loved chatting to the kids and noticing when they lost a tooth or learned to ride a bike. Part of her identity would go, and I felt helpless to prevent it.

And then, out of the blue one Saturday morning, Dave suggested that maybe we could buy the house in William Street from Mum, and fix it up and enable her to live there for as long as she wanted. And so we went to the bank, who said yes because my Mum, who back in her day had to drop out of school in year 9, had paid for me to go to university so I could get a well-paying job. And then the architect who lives next door in the impressively renovated house, that all through my childhood was the neat as a pin old joint owned by Bill Boyle whose only son had died in the war, said he’d do the plans. And the lawyer from the other neighbouring house, where an old lady called Mary lived until she died in the 80s, said she’d do the conveyancing. And so it unfolded.

Today, we have the final plans for Project Number 1608, and next week the builders will come. My beautiful Mum, who is without a doubt the most decent human being I have ever met, will come and live with us for the duration, and will no doubt shit me to tears by about day three. Possibly day two. Similarly, she will also have had enough of me by that point, but will have her beloved Hugh, and her almost equally beloved son-in-law Dave, as a buffer. We have a big house, and we will muddle through, and if it all becomes too much Mum can take her hearing aids out and we’ll all get along much better.

Fast forward a few months (please let it be a few) and she will be back in William Street, living for the very first time in her life, in a house with a new kitchen and a new bathroom. There will be not one, but two toilets inside the house! There will be multiple power points in every room, air-conditioning, a dishwasher (which will no doubt remain untouched), and big glass doors to let the sun stream in so she can sit in her favourite chair and do sudokus and crossword puzzles. There’ll be a little deck out the back where she can sit and admire her garden, where her orange tree will still grow, and where she will still be able to tell the neighbour’s dog Max to shut up. She will still be able to wave to the neighbourhood kids, get fresh eggs, cadge a ride to the supermarket, and be part of this beautiful little community that means the world to her.

My late Dad, who never wanted to leave this place, has not been forgotten in all of this. We will be sprinkling his ashes into the foundations of the rebuild, so he will always be part of the story of William Street, Project Number 1608.

Today’s Fertility Friday post is shared anonymously. Hard to tell, hard to read, but incredibly important. Postnatal depression is experienced by around 1 in every 7 women in Australia, but these stories are often not spoken about, or spoken of only in a whisper. Today’s post is no whisper, it’s an out loud, strongly-voiced, brutally honest account. Thank you to the person who agreed to share it here. I’m proud to know you and count you as a dear friend. 

I have no idea how to start my story. I have started it a couple of times already, but so much of this is so hard to say.

I have two children, a loving husband and life is good. It wasn’t always so. After the birth of my first child I had undiagnosed post-natal depression (PND). It almost tore our family apart. We didn’t know what was going on or how to handle it. Eventually, I sought help and saw a psychologist. She helped me through PND, two miscarriages and the general stress of everyday life. I thought I was okay. Sure, I was still having suicidal thoughts. But doesn’t everyone?

Four years after having our first child I was finally pregnant again and past my 11 week danger zone. We were so happy and scared all at the same time. Because of work, we had to move away from my support network. But I was determined to make it ok. I found an obstetrician. Our son started preschool and loved it. I went to the hospital for a tour of the maternity ward and filled out the paperwork, and ticked yes for having a history of anxiety/depression. We had our 20 week ultrasound and found out our baby was a little girl. I was so excited. This baby that I had waited for was a little girl! We would be best friends, go shopping, talk about boys and plan a life for her. Things were ticking along nicely. 

Then my husband went overseas for work purposes. BOOM! Anxiety and depression moved in. I attended obstetric appointments. I ate all the right things. I told people I was pregnant. However I didn’t feel it. I just had a large stomach and it would be all over soon. I did not want to know or acknowledge it. I was angry. All. The. Time. Our son witnessed my anger. I never raised a hand to him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hurt by what he heard. He was four years old. How was he supposed to know why Mummy was always yelling? I spoke with my obstetrician and midwife about it. But they said to speak with my GP. So I did, and I was told to make an appointment with a psychologist. So I did. I couldn’t get in to see him for another two weeks. My anxiety told me that it wouldn’t help, so I cancelled the appointment after waiting for a week.

On a Wednesday afternoon I got a call from a midwife at the hospital. They were just checking how my pregnancy was going. “Good. No problems.” “You’ve ticked here that you’ve had Mental Health issues in the past. How has that been for you?” I immediately started to cry with this woman I had never met on the other end of the phone. We proceeded to have the best conversation of my life. I will always think of that midwife Karen as my angel. She was just doing her job (her words), but she got me in contact with a psychiatrist. I started seeing the psychiatrist weekly, and it helped a great deal. I had found the right person for me.

As I got closer to my due date I started thinking of my ‘belly’ as my baby again. I prepared the nursery and bought all the essentials. I even thought about names again. Within weeks of this happening my little girl decided to arrive exactly four weeks early. As soon as I heard her cry, I cried. All the guilt and emotion that had built up over the previous few months spilled out. My baby was crying because she needed me, however, I needed her more.

I continued my appointments with the psychiatrist. He put me on antidepressants. Turns out, that was what I needed all along. It is almost four years ago exactly since I started medication. I have had many a low moment since then. I had to try a few different types of medication to get the right one for me. I have also doubled my dose. I’m finally in a good place. I don’t like that I’m on medication, but I am and it helps. I’m exercising, eating right and meditating regularly. My hope is that with time and more of the healthy living I can eventually decrease my medication, but I know that I will always be on antidepressants.

I will also forever feel guilt about the way I spoke to my son and the feelings I pushed aside about my daughter during my pregnancy. I love them more than anything and wish the world for them. One day I will tell them my story, just as I have told you.

[Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is experiencing postnatal depression, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit the Australian Postnatal Depression Website.]

Fertility Friday has rolled around again, and not before time. I know from all your comments and messages that you are loving reading these stories, as much as I am enjoying sharing them.

Today I’m handing the blog over to my dear friend Kristin to talk about her journey. It is one I know well, as we shared a very similar path in both finding our blokes later in life and then having a rocky road to motherhood. Kristin’s dogged determination to become a mother has been equalled only by her love for her beautiful boy Joe. Here is her story.

When I was 12, I had my whole life planned out. In my naivety, I thought I would have successful career in Public Relations, a wonderful caring, attentive husband and two beautiful children all by the age of 25. Well best-laid plans and all that, at the age of 36 I found myself single and childless. I didn’t have a successful career in PR but I did manage a small team of business analysts (see the connection with PR? Me neither.) and I owned my own home and had a gorgeous fur baby, Charlotte.

Living in a regional town where most people got married young and who in their late 30s were either still married or on to their second or third marriage, I thought I was destined to remain on my lonesome. Then it happened, I was at a party and looked across the backyard and saw the man that was to become my husband. It definitely wasn’t love at first sight and he wasn’t my normal type but he was handsome and kind, although very quiet. I might’ve been a bit tipsy (read: drunk) as I made my way over to where he was sitting to have a chat and the rest, as they say, is history. Two years later we were married.

After our wedding we decided to try for a child. Surely, it would be easy. I had spent most of my adult life trying not to get pregnant because I always thought there was such a high chance that I could. After six months of trying with no results, we decided to undergo fertility treatment, especially as at 38 I was considered ‘geriatric’ by doctors! We went to a local ob/gyn who diagnosed me with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (you might know it as PCOS). It wasn’t really a surprise; I had always had very irregular periods and always tended to be on the chubby side. The specialist put me on Clomid and for two cycles, but it didn’t do anything except make me want to stab my husband in the eye with a blunt pencil when he left his shoes lying around the house. When the doctor told me he wanted me to try a third cycle, I burst in to tears. I couldn’t face the emotional and physical side effects for another month.

My good friend, Julie [editor’s note, that’s me!], suggested I try a fertility specialist in Brisbane who she had found to be excellent. And this was how I ended up under the care of Dr Warren De Ambrosis. He was unlike any other doctor my husband and I had met. His sense of humour was so dry but he was so caring and hell-bent on doing everything he could to help get me pregnant. He suggested that IVF was our best option, and so our IVF journey began. He explained that it might not work because my eggs were old, even though my PCOS meant I had the egg stores of a 20 year old. In his words, ‘there were lots of nuts on the tree but they were 39 year old nuts so you wouldn’t want to eat all of them’.

I started the hormone injections and religiously took the regime of vitamins, aspirin, steroids and blood thinners. I had bruises the size of tennis balls on my stomach but it didn’t matter because I wanted to be pregnant more than anything. Often you hear women undergoing fertility treatment say how upset they feel when they see women with babies, but I felt upset when I saw pregnant women because that was my first goal.

The day of my first egg collection came and went (well, I did have hyper stimulated ovaries so I could hardly walk on the day and every bump in the road felt like someone was stabbing me in the abdomen). Warren collected 13 eggs, I knew this because when I came too from the anaesthetic I had ‘13’ written in black nikko all over my lower legs. Over the next five days, we got regular updates from the lab on how our embryos were doing. We ended up with 4 embryos that made it through to blastocyst stage and had two transferred into my uterus.

I endured the 2 week wait and lo and behold, the pregnancy test was positive. I was so happy! One IVF cycle and I was pregnant. How lucky could I be?!? Three weeks later, my joy came crashing down around me. At work I went to the toilets and found I was bleeding. I went to my GP and she sent me for a blood test but suggested I see Warren as soon as I could. The blood test showed that my HCG levels were not rising as they should’ve been. Warren gave me an ultrasound and there was nothing in my uterus. He broke the news that it was probably an ectopic pregnancy. At seven weeks, the embryo was so small he could not see it inside the tube, as he said; it was like ‘trying to see a cockroach that had been swallowed by a snake’. I went home to wait out the weekend. I was hopeful, always hopeful, but things did not look good.

On Monday I travelled to Brisbane to be told it was definitely ectopic and I needed to have the embryo removed the next day. That night I was in agony and the next day I went under general anaesthetic for only the second time in my life, but this time it was to remove my baby. I woke up to find out that my tube had ruptured and had to be removed. So now my already low chances of getting pregnant had just halved! Even now the heartbreak I felt at that time brings me to tears.

I let my body recover and mentally prepared myself for a second round of IVF, when I found out that Dr Wazza was going to be off for a month due to back surgery. Secretly I was relieved because it meant a longer break from hormone injections and those dreaded blood thinners! I went about my daily life and enjoyed the freedom of being ‘hormone’ free. Then one day I was having lunch with one of my besties, and I started to burp. Naomi said to me ‘You’re pregnant!’ I responded with ‘No, I’m not!’ How could I be pregnant? My chances of falling naturally were less than 1%! She said, ‘I have only known you to have reflux one other time and that was when you were last pregnant’. I honestly believed I was not pregnant but I peed on a stick anyway and straight away there were two lines! I walked around the house stunned. I rang my husband and told him the good news. The conversation went something like this, ‘OH MY GOD I AM PREGNANT! OH MY GOD I AM PREGNANT!’

The next few weeks and months were filled with fear of losing this baby but also filled with wonder at the tiny human moving and growing inside me. On the 24th of May 2012 at 5:24am I gave birth to our son, Joseph Daniel. He is the coolest little man that I know. He is kind, funny and smart. He drives me crazy and he lights up my life. I have never known love like the love I have for him. He is truly our miracle baby.

Now I am 44 years old, my hopes of giving Joe a sibling are dwindling. The drive to have another baby is not so strong that I would ever go through the trauma IVF again. But every month a little voice inside me says, ‘Maybe this time…’

Today’s Fertility Friday post is by a very talented author called Yvonne Hughes, whose book One Piece of Advice  is a must-read for people diagnosed with breast cancer, their families and friends. I met Yvonne at a breast cancer forum where she was a guest speaker, and was totally charmed by her honest, funny and heartfelt retelling of how she came to write the book. Yvonne and I kept in touch after the forum, as we have much in common, not least the fact that we are both breast cancer mothers of only boy children. Whilst the sibling ship has sailed for my family, I’m so pleased that Yvonne has agreed to share her story about her family’s wish to bring another child into their lives. 

I’m struggling to write this piece, but I’m going to try anyway. I’m not struggling because I’m too emotional, too angry or too anything really. I’m struggling because it’s complicated.

I often say ‘there’s nothing easy about breast cancer’, and this applies to the fall out from breast cancer too. The big ticket item for the younger women with breast cancer is the affect treatment can have on fertility.

There are many ways it can affect your ability to have children – side effects from chemo, long term medication, or the fact that by the time your treatment was finished you’d missed the baby boat. We don’t all get the chance to freeze eggs before we start treatment – and even if we did, well, that’s not a sure thing anyway.

I didn’t freeze any eggs – I was given the choice, but I decided to get on with treatment right away. I have never regretted my decision – my husband and I were unequivocal in our thinking that our child needed a mother more than a sibling.

Do I feel cheated? Absolutely. But not by anyone responsible for my healthcare. I was presented with choices and I made the decision that I would make again. It’s the situation that cheated me. The fact that I had cancer. The fact that I was powerless to direct my future towards the vision I had for it.

I did make peace with the fact that I would not have a second biological child. I looked at my son and imagined what his brother or sister would have looked like. I imagined them, and I said goodbye.

I did not make peace with the notion that I may not have another child, because I didn’t – and still don’t – believe that this will be the case. I very easily switched my thoughts to adoption. I’ve never believed that I needed to have my ‘own’ child to love it. Any child in my care will be loved, I can say that with 100% surety.

But this isn’t an easy path either. Even with a clean bill of health and a spotless police record, we have not been placed with a child. All the boxes are ticked, all approvals are in place, but the wait continues. The hardest bit is hearing stories of abuse and neglect. Of kids coming to harm when there’s a safe and loving home for them here. It’s being powerless again. Powerless and frustrated.

I told you it was complicated. But it’s not without hope. I saw a movie recently, and there was a scene with a foster carer and a 12 year old boy. She said: ‘I’m so glad we found you. Sorry it took so long.’ If you’re reading this and you’re somewhere in your own fertility journey, take heart and keep hoping. Your child may not come to you in the way you expected, but there are other ways of having a special child in your life. You just have to find them.

Yvonne and her boy.

It’s Fertility Friday time again. I cannot tell you how much I am loving reading and sharing all these amazing stories. It is a privilege to know so many bloody amazing women!

Today’s guest poster is my friend Naomi. As well as doing a frighteningly accurate Mick Jagger impersonation after a couple of drinks, Naomi is also a mother of three. However, she didn’t end up with her three beautiful kids in the ‘usual’ way. This is her story:

My husband and I had always talked about having a family and I guess it is just something that you expect to happen. We had everything planned; the length of our engagement, the wedding and then at our one year anniversary we would start trying for a family and we would have two kids, a boy and a girl. Things never seem to go as planned. We got the engagement and wedding bit right, but it took us three years to get the kids.

We tried for a year on our own to no avail. I made an appointment with my GP who then referred me to a specialist. And so the fun began! It started with blood tests, ultrasounds etc etc. In the end it turned out I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). It’s quite common and one of the leading causes of infertility in women. As many as 25% of women of childbearing age have PCOS, but most don’t even know that they have it until they begin trying to get pregnant. The big problem with PCOS is that you don’t tend to ovulate regularly, making it very difficult to conceive. Generally medical assistance is required so the process for us started out with tablets to bring on ovulation which then meant more blood tests, ultrasounds etc etc. It quickly became a very tedious process and the exact opposite of romantic – particularly when your doctor gives you and injection and then orders you to have sex at 10pm that night! Totally takes the romance out of “making a baby”.

For me this cycle continued for about a year with no success, until my doctor then informed me that we might need to do a bit more to make this happen, so the next part of the journey was some surgery. “Ovarian drilling” to be exact. They didn’t strike oil down there, but instead helped stimulate the ovaries to encourage them to produce those little eggs I so desperately needed. Surgery – tick, ovaries stimulated – tick, baby – nil. So the next part of the treatment was what I lovingly love to refer to, “the turkey baster method”, or for those medically inclined, IUI – Intrauterine Insemination. Basically my husband was required to do his part of the deal in a cup, the doctor then took that contribution and spun the semen in a machine to get the sperm all excited about this conception business, and once the spinning was complete the doctor puts the sperm in a syringe and inserted them inside my clacker! Along with this process came lots of needles to produce lots of follicles that were ready to pop.

Finally, we had success and I took a pregnancy test on Mother’s Day in 2004. Woo hoo! We were so super excited but the excitement didn’t last for too long. Unfortunately at around the 8/9 week mark I suffered a miscarriage. I was so very angry and upset – it had taken us two years to get a positive result and now it was being taken away from us. Of course all around me friends and relatives were getting pregnant and I was happy for them but inside me was this little voice saying “why them and not me?”. I guess that is the crappiest part of infertility, the hormonal roller coaster ride. My poor husband at times didn’t know what to say to me. Of course I blamed it all on myself because I was the one with PCOS. I would often find myself apologising to him because I knew how much he wanted children.

I eventually bounced back from the loss of our baby and soldiered back on with trying to get our bundle of joy. We continued the IUI cycles for another 12 months and exactly 12 months to the day we found out we were pregnant again. Yay!!!!!

This time it was a little different. I didn’t feel so hot. The pregnancy test came back positive really, really quickly. Looked like my hormone levels were very high. The first sign of multiples came in the form of over stimulation of the ovaries, which was incredibly painful and not much fun at all. Then at 7 weeks we trotted off to our doctor to have our first scan. While we were driving to the appointment my husband reached over grabbed my hand and held three fingers and he indicated to me that he thought we had three. I of course just laughed it off. The doctor lead us into the ultrasound room and proceeded to probe my belly “Congratulations we have twins!” then came the “hang on a sec……………….we have a third!!!!!”. From that moment on our lives would never be the same again.

On the 24 November 2005, I gave birth to triplet girls – Imogen, Caitlin and Hayley. The girls were kept in hospital for a period of four weeks and came home on the 22 December 2005. We were blessed with three very healthy babies. I don’t think anything can prepare you for the total shock of bringing home a baby for the first time, let alone three, but the support that we received from family, friends and total strangers was absolutely amazing.

It was quite a journey to get our girls, but they continue to bring us so much joy. Of course I tell them quite often how hard we worked to get them. They still find it quite freaky that I could fit three of them in my belly. Trust me when I say it wasn’t the most comfortable pregnancy, but we got there in the end. It has definitely been hard work having three at once but I wouldn’t swap it for the world. They are three very unique personalities, and can at times have a love-hate relationship like all siblings, but they are sisters who will always share a very special bond.

The next guest post in my Fertility Friday series is written by my dear friend Sam. I’ve actually already written a little bit about Sam’s pregnancy in this post. Sam and I work together, and her struggle with infertility and IVF built an incredible bond between us, as only a shared understanding of pain can. I truly will never forget the day she told me she was pregnant – my heart felt like it was going to squeeze out of my chest with happiness that finally, FINALLY!, it had happened. Despite the fact she is now in the ‘holy crap when people said I’d be tired I had no idea that they actually meant this’ stage of new motherhood, Sam has found the time to put her experience into words here. 

There were a few years in my late 20s and early 30s where I really couldn’t stand Mother’s Day. All of that commercialised bull. Or so I told myself.

In reality, I resented all of those mothers out there who would wake up on that early Sunday morning in May to hear excited little foot steps running down the hall to their bedroom. And a toothless grin from a tiny little human flinging the bedroom door open, with a handmade card in one hand and burnt Vegemite toast in the other. Or maybe it would be a painted macaroni necklace and lukewarm cup of tea? There would be sloppy kisses and big hugs and all that gooey, oozey love that only tiny little humans can give.

I resented all those beautiful mums out there who would experience all those little things that I thought I never would. My husband and I started ‘trying’ when I was 27. When I say trying I mean we ditched the pill and hoped for the best. We had been together since we were 18. We had studied, gotten good jobs, a mortgage, a fur baby, and then another fur baby. We’d done all the ‘right’ things in preparation to bring a tiny human into the world.

At first we were pretty relaxed about it all. But then a year passed, and then another. By 29, we upped the ante and started to get more serious about ‘trying’. We were relatively young and healthy, and on the outside looked like we should be in our fertility prime. But no luck.

We saw specialists and were told that we had a 1% chance of conceiving naturally. It was crazy. We weren’t even in our 30s. That kind of thing happened when you were old. Turns out that all of those years of horrible period pain was actually endometriosis. That and, as the fertility doc explained, my ovaries looked like they were wearing pearl necklaces (but not the good kind). I had the double whammy – endo and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). It took years for a diagnosis because I didn’t have any of the classic symptoms.

IVF was our best option. So we optimistically went for it. And despite all of our optimism and hope (and financial expense), it didn’t work for us. Emotionally, it was a rollercoaster. Cliche metaphor I know, but all my fellow IVF peeps out there, you know what I mean. We silently salute each other when we pass in the hallways. For those who haven’t had to experience it, let’s just say IVF, when it doesn’t work, is shit. Or as my husband would say,  fucking horrible.

As time passed, I found myself googling ‘how to adopt in Australia’ in my lunch break  (turns out that’s not a piece of cake either). Hubby and I were having those serious philosophical conversations that went something like ‘do we really want kids or do we just feel societal pressure to have kids because we’re married and in our 30s?’ and, ‘well, if we can’t have kids, we can just be a great Uncle and Aunty to the nieces and nephews and focus on travel’ and ‘maybe we could get a miniature pig?’ (yes, we really did have that conversation because three chooks, two dogs and an arsehole of a cat still didn’t fill that void).

We’d decided to focus on our careers, do a bit more travel and then give IVF, despite all of its horribleness, another go. I applied for a new job, booked a trip to India and spoke to the fertility doc about doing another round in December.

Then one afternoon in September, after not feeling so well all week, I realised I was ‘late’. I poured myself a glass of wine and ran myself a bath. This was a ritual I had developed over the years to deal with the comedown after having my hopes up that I may be pregnant. That stupid blue line had been evading me for years. Off I went with my pee stick, waiting to stare aimlessly at that imaginary line.

Within seconds, a determined, strong, bold, blue line appeared.

What the…?

I was pregnant!

No rhyme nor reason to it. After years of trying, I just was. That sneaky 1% chance finally came through for us. At first my husband didn’t believe me. After years of disappointment, he’d trained himself to be the reasoned sceptic, gently talking me around in case it was a false positive so I didn’t get my hopes up and then crash and burn. So, as you can imagine, our first scan was pure magic. The rhythm of that strong heartbeat confirmed any doubt. And both of us already so in love with our tiny little human. We couldn’t believe we could be so lucky.

Now to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy pregnancy. I was bloody tired. All. The. Time. (‘Good practice for when the Bub comes’, I was told. Yeah, that’s so not funny.) I’d gone from running daily and finishing my first half marathon just months earlier to puffing while walking up two flights of stairs. While I absolutely adored my expanding belly and still get emotional when I think about that amazing feeling of my tiny little baby kicking and squirming inside me, my body just wasn’t able to do what I wanted it to do. There was definitely some adjustment needed. But how could I complain? I was just so damn relieved and happy to be experiencing all the good, bad and ugly that is pregnancy (heartburn and all).

Then, after what felt like a lifetime, she arrived. It was an early Sunday morning in May that I gave birth to my tiny little human. My tiny, perfect, love of my life,  miracle, little human.

Actually, come to think of it, it was the second Sunday in May. Mother’s Day.

Happy Mother’s Day to me.

Last week I started a series of guest posts about fertility – stories of hope and sadness; real stories from real women, whose strength and courage defies what we often think is humanly possible. This week’s guest poster is a very dear friend of mine, Katrina. She is one of the smartest, warmest and most honest people I know. The notion of living an authentic life is one that has been caught up in new age bullshit and hype, but as Katrina tells her story below, I think you’ll agree she is someone who is above all, real.

I moved out of home when I was 15. I met my husband when I was 16 years old. We had our first daughter when I was 17 years old, became engaged and moved into together when I was 19 years old, had our second daughter when I was 21, purchased our first home when I was 22 and got married when I was 23. I am now 43 years old and I am going to be a grandmother in 14 weeks time. What a whirlwind the last 27 years has been. Life is good. My husband and I now are empty-nesters, and very much looking forward to the next phase of our lives as grandparents.

When telling this story to people who don’t know me, I am often met with a look of shock. Actually, not just one look of shock but many looks with varying degrees of the shock element as the story unfolds. The first look is usually in response to a casual conversation about how I am going to be a grandmother soon. I receive the usual ‘no way you don’t look old enough to be a grandmother!’ – I like that part.  I am sure that the person then thinks I will then tell a story about having a much older husband and that my step child is expecting. Instead, I tell them that I have a 26 year old daughter, followed by me feeling the need to overshare with the detail just to clarify that I wasn’t 13 or 14 when I had my first child, I was 17. Three or four years for this conversation topic makes all the difference. After the shocked look usually comes a comment like, you have done so well, must have been difficult being a teenage mum, how did you manage … I am appreciative to these people for their empathy but my first response is usually, not really, we all have our challenges in life. I guess it was difficult, but lots of things in life can be difficult. To me, life is always challenging and difficult for each of us at various times. I usually finish off this conversation stating that we will all be sitting in the nursing home together talking about our lives, challenges and our achievements. It is likely our journey will be much the same, just experienced in different ways and at different times. Being a teenage mother is not especially good or bad. Parenting is a wonderful experience, a challenge and and a reward, no matter what age you are when you become a parent.

As I wrote this piece I wondered why people would want to read about my experiences as a teenage Mum. I searched on the internet for information about teenage pregnancy and being a teen mum, and there is a lot of information available. A lot of it was quite horrifying data about the negative issues surrounding teenage pregnancy and the children of teenage mothers, low socio economic status complications and cyclic generational teenage pregnancies. Lots of scary stuff that if I had of read 27 years ago, I would have gone into a deep, dark depression about having a baby at 17 because the studies showed that it was all going to go badly.

All that research really does beg the question: do I regret having a child when I was a teenager? I think about what I might have missed out on. What were my friends doing whilst I was raising a child? Going to university, partying and having late nights, sleeping in, going overseas. The truth is, I didn’t really missed out on any of that. I still socialised with my friends, but I just had some additional complexity in planning and preparation to ensure a stay at Nanna’s that night for my daughter. I have always studied and I am still studying now; and these days, whilst many of my friends still have small children, I am able to enjoy an occasional night out and sleep in the next day for as long as I want! I have also travelled extensively, having had a job for about five years where I was required to travel overseas at least three times per year. I really don’t think I have missed out on too much, and actually I feel very lucky to be blessed with a wonderful husband (well, wonderful most of the time) who I am still excited to see every day, as well as two beautiful daughters who are successfully building their lives and careers, accompanied by two of the best sons-in-law I could have hoped for. And now a grandson on the way – life is so very good, it would seem ridiculous to say I regretted the way it all started out.

Although being a teenage mum didn’t ruin my life and I can honestly say I have no regrets, I was also, for many reasons, keen for my daughters to follow in my footsteps. Whilst I love my life, there were some really awful moments, particularly when I found out I was pregnant, that I didn’t want my daughters to have to experience.  I therefore ensured I instilled into them from from a young age that the birth control pill may not be effective if on one day you take it at 4pm instead of your usual 8am time; and that I strongly recommended that they did not fall pregnant at 17 and not to tie themselves into relationship too early. I jokingly told my eldest daughter a couple of years ago that although I hadn’t wanted her to be a teenage Mum, it was now time for me to have a grandchild. I’m so glad she listened to my advice.

Family – me, my husband, our daughters and their partners

It occurred to me recently that I know so many women with so many incredible stories relating to their fertility. Stories of triumph, loss, joy, grief, perseverance, heartache and pure love. Stories that, because they are ‘just what happened to me’, are often only known to the woman and a close circle of family and friends around her. As someone who has suffered significant grief and loss because of fertility issues, it meant so much to me, actually still means so much to me, to know that I was not alone. Being able to share my story on this blog has helped me both to mourn what I lost and celebrate what I have – so much so, that I decided to start a series called Fertility Fridays. Every Friday from today until everyone who wants to tell their story has told it, I will publish a guest post about fertility, and how families are made, lost and sometimes made anew. These will be stories of hope and sadness; real stories from real women, whose strength and courage defies what we often think is humanly possible.

My first contributor is Janine. Janine and I used to play under 15s basketball together, and reconnected 30 years later when she came to my office for a meeting, and we both did that whole ‘hang on a minute, don’t I know you’ thing.  Janine has an incredible story of perseverance and determination, and ultimately, joy, and I am so pleased she has agreed to share it here.

I was turning 40, divorced and hoping to met the man of my dreams when it hit me like a sledge-hammer that my clock was ticking and I was very quickly about to run out of time. My hope of ever having children was rapidly slipping away from me. I decided I needed to take positive action or I was going to remain childless forever. I considered my options, and knew that I couldn’t put myself through the Saturday night pick-up routine, so I made an appointment with my GP to request a referral to a fertility specialist. It wouldn’t be that hard, right? After all, it wasn’t like I had been trying to fall pregnant, so if I did try, it would be easy. Wrong!

The first cycle didn’t work, nor the second, nor did the following seven. That’s right, I did nine cycles. I just kept hoping I would get lucky and one little egg would work. All of the sudden everywhere I looked I saw pregnant women that I had never noticed before, even the ducks on my morning walk had babies – why couldn’t I? My doctor was blunt, proclaimed he wasn’t the magician I so desperately wanted him to be, and advised if I wanted children I had better consider donor eggs.

By this stage I was approaching 45 and thought I might as well go out and buy granny undies and grow old with my cats. It was emotionally draining enough to go through all the failed cycles, but to have a child using donor eggs and donor sperm with no genetic link, was too much.

In a visit with my GP, I told him I had better get used to the idea of no children and that I needed to accept that it just wasn’t meant to be. His advice was that if I really wanted to make it happen I should at least try with donor eggs and that I would love any child I carried wholeheartedly, genetic ties or not. It took me six months to make the decision to give it a go.

I did my research and took off to Spain with the hope of getting pregnant via donor egg and sperm. Two weeks after returning I had a pregnancy test and the results told me what I already knew. I was pregnant! I thought the hard bit was over but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Overall, I had a relatively easy pregnancy from a medical perspective, but I lived in fear of losing this child. The day finally came for the birth, and I’ll never forget the moment I met my beautiful boy.

Many will argue that a family is made up of a man and a woman and their offspring. I certainly grew up believing I would have a loving husband, two happy children and a house with a white picket fence. Obviously, that didn’t work out so well for me. I was raised Catholic and had struggled with the concept of being a single mum. Initially, I found myself explaining to people why he had no father but after a while I realised that at my age I was entitled to make my own choices and I’m proud that I had the courage to go through it all by myself.

I have been asked if I will tell him of his origins and the answer is, absolutely. He will be told he is a very loved little boy, that mummy went all the way across the other side of the world to find him. I will tell him some very kind donors made him possible by giving me the cells that he grew from, and I will take him back to Spain one day to show him where he comes from.

I am biased, like every mother, and truly believe I have received a very special gift. I cannot begin to explain the joys of motherhood and the connection I feel to this child. He is everything to me and absolutely nothing else comes close. It has completely changed my life. My focus had been on the professional career I was pursuing and now it’s about being the best mother I can be and I can’t imagine a life without him. I guess I have finally met the man of my dreams, he is a lot smaller than I’d imagined but he gives me a whole lot more joy than I ever thought possible, and he does have some of my DNA.

Being diagnosed with cancer sorts the wheat from the chaff, in terms of people in your life. Some people you thought you’d be able to rely on disappear into the ether so fast they leave a fine coating of dust on your newly-bald head, whilst others who might have only been on the periphery of your life come to the fore in unexpected but incredibly important ways. Others still stay the same – those constant, firm, stable friends who knew you then, know you now, will always know you.

Fortunately for me, the grieving I did over those who disappeared was brief and exact, because I thought I was dying, and there is no clarity like that provided by the bright, white light of your impending doom. And once that grieving was done, the bright light of doom shone on all the people who had stepped forward, and all those who  would always be in the front row. Doom actually started to feel ok, because I was so loved, so supported, so fucking lucky.

One of the people who showed herself to be wheat of the finest grade during my illness was my hairdresser Tracy. We became friends as she gradually chopped my hair shorter and shorter in anticipation of it falling off, and she proved to be such a staunch supporter when times were truly tough, taking me out for lunch, calling, texting, checking in. We realised that her boy and mine liked all the same things, so they too became friends, bonding over Minecraft and Lego. When my hair grew back she guided me through the shock of having curly hair for the first time, having grey hair when I’d always dyed it, and having short hair when for so many years I’d hidden behind its length. She told me I looked chic, and I believed her, because if anyone knows chic it’s my beautiful, stylish friend Tracy.

And now, almost four years on, it’s time to pay forward and pay back. Tracy got the call too, the dreaded, awful, paralysing call to tell her she had breast cancer. She had her right breast (same as me) removed on a Thursday (same as me) a couple of weeks ago, and is about to head into chemo (different from me). We have talked and talked, and last night compared scars while our boys played in another room. Her daughter, young but not young enough not to know, was hesitant to ask me questions, but once she started it all came out and with age-appropriate honesty I showed her that cancer was treatable, beatable, doable. I told her it would be hard, and that it wasn’t fair, but look at me now, four years later. She did look at me, really look at me whilst my shirt was pulled up around my neck, and then said ‘You’re normal!’. As compliments go, it was en pointe – pleasing to hear but distinctly embellished – everything a compliment should be. But more importantly, the moment had shown that gorgeous girl that amongst all the fear and flux going on in her life, there was a chance – a really decent chance – that life would at some point not too far away, go on. No doubting she will be forever changed by this experience, but knowing my boy and his resilience and empathy, that change will likely not detract from who she becomes, but rather make her a more human, human being.

For her mum, there is so much in front of her that will appear insurmountable, but that can, with the right combination of medical science and good fortune, be climbed.  And thanks to medical science and good fortune, I will be there, paying it forward and paying it back.

I wrote this poem almost exactly a year ago for my friend Antoinette, who I met because we both had cancer. Her cancer was terminal at diagnosis, but she was full of life, and love and grace, and lived each day intent on making the most of every moment. I was nervous about showing Annie the poem, because she was the sort of friend who wouldn’t bullshit you, but she loved it, she said it made her laugh and cry and feel all the things in between.

From the day we met we had many conversations about many things, from the mundane to the most exquisitely painful. We talked about her children’s life without her, which always brought her to her knees, but despite her grief she made many, many plans to help ease their way through the world once she was gone. She never took herself too seriously, no matter the gravity of the situation, and I laughed so hard when she told me that she had met with the funeral director, and that he was a nice bloke but she felt a bit awkward knowing that one day he would see her naked.

Annie died yesterday. When I found out I came to  the blog to find the post with the poem, because it gave me a sense of connection to her, but it was gone. I never delete posts, but somehow that particularly precious one got lost in the black hole of cyberspace, and I was devastated. I tried many times during the day to find it, searching WordPress and the Internet and email send items and eventually my entire computer, all to no avail. My inability to find the post fuelled my anger and grief about her loss, but late last night, at the end of a very long day, through Facebook Messenger comes a copy of my post! Our mutual friend Jo, quite possibly the most fucking determined individual I have ever met, did some magic Internet jiggery-pokery and got me a copy of the post, which means I can republish the poem today.

There is a Light

We met in an airport, not like the plot of a romantic movie kind of way, because in movies people with cancer don’t meet in airports,
they lie in tragic beds looking tragic.
Tragedy, it’s hard to bear.
Like a Bee Gees song.

We shared a twin room, my breathing reminded you of one of your kids.
What about my farting? No mention of that …
The courage in you, steely, outrageously so, but then
the vulnerability. Oh that beautiful girl.

There is a light –
I’ll always see it, because it was so glaringly bright.
I didn’t need to look for long.
Now I can see it even when my eyes are closed,
And I’m in another city, hours away,
Months later.

I’ll carry a little bit of you, a tiny bit.
In my eyes.
I’ll look at things, maybe something funny or a news story
about a stick-up, and my eyes will see it with that little bit of your light
glinting in the corner.

I have no idea why things happen as they do, I think
maybe one day, on the flip side, you will know and I can only
hope that it’s a really fucking good reason.
Because right now, nothing springs to mind.

Antoinette was an incredibly private person, who made the difficult choice of publicising her story so that others might not suffer the same fate as her. Please read her story here, and share it widely with your friends and family.

Annie, it was an honour and a privilege.