Category: Fertility

Fertility is the cycle of life – how can we use its teachings to birth our own creative projects and see beyond its literal meaning?

Fertility /

Women Aren’t Failures When Fertility Treatment Fails

I remember vividly the day that I disclosed my multiple failed fertility treatments to a colleague and how tough I was finding the whole process. To be fair, I was fairly detached as I spoke at my sadness and the rollercoaster of emotions, and she was most familiar with me in my work mode, where I was capably continuing to go about my day job with few noticeable outward displays of the distress and turmoil I felt inside. Nonetheless, her words hit me like a sucker punch in the gut. “You’re not used to failure are you?”. Until that moment, I hadn’t ever considered that I had been failing, more that I was in the middle of a process that was excruciatingly painful at times, yet also one that offered the greatest hope of conception. Whether she was trying to help by pointing out these failures and my unfamiliarity with them, I can’t honestly say, but her directness forced me to identify with a deeply buried feeling of failure.

She was right that on the surface, I was very driven to achieve excellent results for my students, that I set myself high standards and enjoyed making and seeing progress in my work, but the thing about fertility treatment is that there is so much that can go wrong at each step of the process. Of course, a woman can improve her chances by making good lifestyle and health choices, but the truth of the matter is that we are more at the mercy of our biology and health technologies than we realise and despite placing our faith and often great expectations on the incredible teams who work in reproductive healthcare, the reality is that treatment is tough on the mind, body and soul, failed cycles of treatment hurt like hell, and the odds, sadly, aren’t promising for two thirds of us from the get-go.

But as women we have been encouraged to believe that we can empower ourselves enough to overcome anything, that if we dream it real, think positively enough, drink enough raspberry tea, then we too can have the much desired child we deserve to have. But life and its creation doesn’t work like that. As Ellie’s character in this week’s episode of River City showed, biological clocks tick on, eggs or sperm may not be of good enough quality, even where they do exist in high number, and the emotional toll can be so great, I certainly asked myself more than once if I had the strength to carry on.

My main message though is this. If you are trying to conceive, are mid treatment or have even exhausted the treatment process, whether you have a child or don’t, you, my brave, beautiful friend, are the furthest thing from failure it is possible to be. Please try not to beat yourself up, you don’t deserve that. You need as much self-care and compassion as you can muster from yourself and your inner circle. We cannot control these outcomes anymore than we can the weather and while that won’t stop us trying to do everything we can, I beg of you not to hurt yourself more in the process by identifying with the label of failure. Women are so much more than (in)fertility can make us feel and although we’ve moved many strides forward in our place in the world, old expectations about child rearing are not only influenced by those around us, by societal expectations, but so too, do we face the double-bind of wanting our place in the world free of the limitations of our biology, while desperately wanting to do what comes naturally to may women and couples; to create life.

Take good care of yourself and find support wherever you can.

With a warm hug.

Lisa 💜https://youtu.be/leCi-I7KrEM

Feminism /

What Makes a Feminist in III Acts

As far back as I can tell, I have always been a feminist. A shy one, an angry one, a closeted one and now, a more compassionate one as well. In my early twenties, I remember the joy at discovering that the rape crisis service I’d applied to work for was an openly feminist organisation. What luck, I thought, to have finally found a home for my feminist views.

But alas, I was too young to be able to handle what it threw at me and as I reflect from what I hope is at least the mid-point of my career and life, I offer up some insights as to what made me into the feminist I am today and what on earth I’m going to do with the gift of experience.

Act I – The Garden of Eden Holds Few Sweet Blooms

I was about nine or ten when the local boys lined up outside a rickety old shed in one of their back gardens as they took turns at going inside to kiss me. They didn’t hold me in there against my will, they just expected that I would submit to their awkward, hard, sloppy kisses. I did submit, because I was a good girl and I always did, or at least, tried to do, what others told me to do. I felt no pleasure. But I did desperately want to fit in and by the time I was nineteen I’d had more boyfriends than girlfriends, which was a terrible shame really. No gold star for me.

Eventually, the forays of burgeoning sexuality gave way to the more serious pursuit of education on the path to young adulthood. I left the North of Scotland for the bright city lights of my family’s hometown, Edinburgh. Still the good girl, I applied myself more than ever, desperate to prove myself worthy and gained an MA (Hons) in Languages. I spent four years locked up in the “computer lab“ studying until late at night, before jumping the bus at midnight to become safely embalmed in the city’s hot, sweaty gay scene, seven nights a week with my favourite partners in crime. Life was peachy and I swapped the garden shed for the sticky basement of CC Blooms, only this time, we were all willing participants.

The day I gained my undergraduate degree, I cried hot tears of relief, releasing the fear that I was not clever enough to gain my degree. My peers made a good attempt at covering their delight at my 2:2, but I knew I had learned a powerful lesson about applying myself and I mused about what dizzy heights would await me if I studied something I was really interested in, as opposed to what I’d been good at in school.

Gradually, I set about securing a collection of certificates and degrees and scholarships I am only now beginning to appreciate. Nothing less than distinction became my mantra over the next 15 years, and I applied this in my professional life as much as to my education. I never felt the urge to compete with others in this pursuit, but I was a cruel opponent to myself. Driven to achieve, as if the external symbols of success would give me a free pass to a better, more satisfying, more successful life. And to be fair, everything did seem rosy, at least on the outside – good jobs, well paid, with opportunities to grow, learn and travel, a mortgage, a pension, holidays, festivals if I wanted them, food in my cupboards and enough to pay the bills. Then, boom, biological failure struck without me ever realising that I had been afraid of it.

Act II – Cheerio success, hello failure

I had controlled everything else in my life quite nicely, thank you very much, so why would becoming a mother be an exception? But round after round of Intra-Uterine Insemination, drug-assisted efforts, a private donor, and finally IVF, over an emotionally exhausting four years, and I had finally met the darkness that sought to defeat me. My body wasn’t cooperating, and my spirit broke a little more each month I bled.

I had played by the rules for so long, I was devastated when my tried and tested methods got me nowhere. No amount of raspberry tea, or yoga, or dieting, or abstinence, or keeping fit were going to get me pregnant. I needed the help of the cold, clinical laboratories to get pregnant and this went against everything I’d ever been taught to think about conception and motherhood. Heck, I didn’t even fully know how my reproductive organs and hormones worked back then. All I had to rely on was the familiar, punishing self-cruelty, as I blamed myself month, after month, after month, for not being able to do what happens so naturally for many women (or at least, that’s what we’re all led to believe).

Of course, I had an obvious barrier to motherhood – as a lesbian, no amorous lie-down on a Friday night was going to create the child I so desperately wanted, but beyond that fact, there were multiple barriers to be faced. I had silently coped with the chronic pain of undiagnosed endometriosis for twenty-three years, so even the strongest of swimmers would have found the journey through my tubes a treacherous one. When it came to IVF, the haul of eggs to be harvested was half the ideal crop lessening my chances further. Thirty-six years of shame about my useless, incapable, female body all bubbling up to the surface each time the fertility nurse brought out the speculum. Then there was the lack of donors. The achingly slow administration of healthcare. And to top it off, coping mostly alone, or in my own head, and out of reach of anyone who tried her best to help.

The pain and the silence became crippling until I decided I needed some professional help. I took a career break believing that I needed to have done everything I possibly could to give myself the best chance of conception, and in any case, I had tried everything else. I didn’t want to look back years from then and regret that I’d not given myself the best chance of conception, so I found a therapist to navigate the complexity of emotions. I was inconsolable and desperately sad that the script I had so dutifully followed, yielded none of the return I had expected. Being a good girl sucked if it meant that believing in the myth of meritocracy or the study-work-pension-retire narrative you’d been told for so long, especially if you still felt useless, worthless, and hopeless.

Then suddenly it all changed overnight.

Act III – The Breaking of the Cycle

Years of trauma gave way to the hope and delight of feeling my son grow in my belly. I remember each stretch of a foot or bout of nausea or insomnia, with pride. I did it. I grew a beautiful, perfect, baby boy inside my body. Today I bear the visible remnants of my pregnant body with joy and gratitude for the life I created. I had changed though and although it would take another few years before I found the grace to say what I wanted without upsetting those closest to me, I started to speak out about the overwhelm I felt as a new mother. This was not what I had learned about myself, a capable, competent, independent woman who knew what she wanted and worked hard to achieve it.

Of course, the instincts I felt as a mother were there as soon as I knew I was pregnant. I sang to him all day long, took him swimming in the ocean, gently rode on horseback for the first few months, I cradled my bump like there was no other comfort. I applied the same rigour I had learned in the university library to the treatment of gestational diabetes, only this time it worked. My blood sugar stayed low as I followed the advice to the letter. But I also started noticing the frequent disparities between the advice of different healthcare professionals and the treatment of women in the hospital or clinic. I felt gratitude for the fertility clinic, but the treatment of expectant or new mothers felt like 1950s midwifery window-dressed as modern-day management practice and it was anything but comforting or soothing to my broken spirit.

My emotional reserves were depleted until one day I woke and realised that this was my life, and no-one was coming to save me, or give me the answers, I would have to dig in and fight for my life so that my son wouldn’t have to. You see, it wasn’t just the highs and lows of down-regging or the sixteen failed attempts at conception that deflated my soul, it was the accumulation of lots of little, and too many big, events that had caused years of underlying trauma to go unaddressed. The speculum eventually enabled my son’s conception and yet it had also enabled what felt like the intense scrutiny of my vagina, my cervix, my womb, and my ovaries, in a world that had taught me I was shameful and dirty. My preparation for this had been anything but helpful. I had grown up in a materially well-provided for but frightening home, conditions that do not make for taking up the space needed to process and thrive through fertility treatment. The years of trying to prove myself had taken their toll and although it makes sense to me now that my body and my emotions were not a safe haven, back then I couldn’t have told this story or explained it in any other way, than I was a failure.

When my son was nine months old, something woke me up out of the nightmare I’d been living. I knew I had to survive because dying wasn’t in my son’s best interests. I had first-hand experience of a close family member’s attempted suicide and I simply could not allow myself to get that bad. I needed a plan.

Slowly but surely, I gathered the energy to think about going back to work and I did so in spectacular style (if I rate myself according to the Good Girl Rule Book). I took on a big job that I had no idea would transform my outlook on life completely and kickstart my recovery from a Good Girl to a Fulltime Feminist working to support women to free themselves from whatever uncomfortable situation they find themselves personally, or at work.

I had followed the rules and done what I thought was expected of me as a child, a young woman, a daughter, an employee, and by and large, it all looked good on the surface. But the hidden aspects of my life as a woman left my soul in denial about the reality of a woman’s place.

Trauma arising from domestic violence, multiple “minor” sexual assaults, undiagnosed endometriosis, fertility problems and treatment, sexism at work, patriarchal models of living forced on us by big society, governments, the media, tech giants and commercial interests are terrible ingredients to sustain and nurture women and girls. When I say it like that, it’s a wonder I didn’t reach this conclusion sooner, but it was not until I faced the full wrath of a few desperately unhappy people that I begun to realise that no-one likes a successful, capable woman, especially if her very existence causes them to take a long hard look in their own mirror. Much easier to smear another woman than address the weaknesses in oneself. There I said it. Sexism is as alive among women as it ever was, and for those who should know better, you’ll find them staring at their shoes so that you become ostracised as the angry, unreasonable, hostile woman it is comfortable for them to believe you are.

But bit by bit, we must refuse to accept anything less than our right to live our lives as the capable women we were born to be. My silence cost me dearly in the past and it is too high a price to pay for my wellbeing, for my son’s future, for the futures of the men, women, and children I may be lucky enough to connect with in future. If not for ourselves, ladies and gents, then for our children.

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