Trying...to return

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Greetings to you still here. And a big thank you for sticking around or just joining. It’s been over a year since I last wrote to you. I have had a few false starts coming back. But considering I am on a mission to not let the best be the enemy of the good - or in fact anything at all - I realise that penning something is definitely better than nothing.

The truth is that I started this newsletter in the depths of IVF despair. It was always, as I made clear at the time, a project that was about more than assisted conception. But I know a lot of you joined me here initially because of this piece in The Times where I shared what was happening while trying for a second child. 

I deliberately called this newsletter Trying because I am a trier - or at least I try to be - in all areas of my life. And I've decided to resume it and hope you will stay and others will join us - as we all try new things, try old things or try to manage the day to day.

I was intrigued by the writer Lena Dunham’s brief assault on trying last year but that’s not my position. I think simply “being” as she prescribes, is sometimes very trying in itself. And sometimes to be, the only thing you can do is try.

Since I last wrote - I had the baby; our girl. She did arrive and it did happen - despite my many, many fears. And to be honest I feel conflicted saying anything more about it because of the deep feelings I have for those reading this who are still not there. And yet I know my candour in these letters has been of use and valued - even if you aren’t directly connected to fertility issues. So I shall keep it brief and to the point - in a bid to avoid saccharine cliches, oversharing and causing too much pain.

When our daughter was pulled out of me in a freezing NHS operating theatre deep within the bowels of a hospital in central snowy London last January and I took in her sweet puckered face and 10 fingers and toes, I lay back and felt like I’d crossed a finishing line. My own personal bodily Olympics. A line I never thought I’d reach. Relief flooded my body.

The feeling was enormous, having been too scared to believe it would happen. I also found myself improbably exclaiming: “We are having a baby.” It felt like my pregnancy announcement and birth all at the same time.

She was also born to an absolute banger blaring out of my phone in my husband’s shaky hands: Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy. I can’t wait to go dancing with her to that. Even the surgeon was moving her shoulders as she sewed me back up.

I was then high for many, many days on that simple truth - she was here. It had worked. 

There is no other way to put it. I have written that nobody undergoes IVF for it not to work. And that’s why you go and go again - if you are able to - physically, emotionally and financially. Until you get there and have the baby. It is totally binary and brutal.

Some don’t get there. Some won’t and will never. Some get to being a parent in a totally different way from how they’d imagined. 

But for some  - you do - and it is absolutely astonishing. I think it is important to say that clearly and unequivocally. And I hope by saying finishing line you don’t mistake the comparison for me in any way thinking that I won a race. And beat anyone else. It was the more the sense that I got there in the personal race I seemed to have set myself and IVF was finally over. That the decision to go back into that unforgiving ring, jab after jab, pessary after pessary, was worth it.

To not share the sheer joy and relief that flooded my body post birth would be to do down the extraordinary experience that many of you have subjected yourselves to. Or perhaps someone close to you has. 

I am still processing it. But I am also incredibly relieved that this form of trying is now completely and utterly over. Limbo land ain’t fun. But writing to you is. And I am looking forward to slipping back into your inboxes each week and more. 

In the meantime - crank up Smalltown Boy and have a dance with me. I’m doing it as I hit ‘publish’. It’s good to be back.