Sophie Beresiner - The Mother Project: Making it to Parenthood the (Very) Long Way Round

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

FIRST EDITION

Sophie Beresiner 2021

Cover design by author HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

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Sophie Beresiner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008456863

Ebook Edition May 2021 ISBN: 9780008456870

Version: 2021-04-15

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For Marlies.

You found me, in the end.

By whatever means you were always going to.

This time last decade I was everything I needed to be. Only just thirty, new boyfriend after a four-year relationship hiatus (Thank Christ, said my concerned ovaries), becoming someone in an industry that is notoriously hard to break into and with wonderful hair that refused to cooperate in the best way possible. In fact I began 2010 celebrating my thirtieth birthday in a cottage with five of my friends. We were playing a last-decade board game called A Question Of Scruples while we drank as much alcohol as our livers would allow. (Ha! We drank way more than that we were only thirty once after all.) The game basically posed moral dilemmas on life, work, love et cetera, and players would guess each others responses to win points. My new boyfriend picked a card from the deck and read aloud to his new audience: What would you do if you found out your girlfriend was infertile?

I should add a caveat here that his nickname was Dad Jokes and so, in an overexerted effort to be funny, he yelled, LEAVE HER!

Um, LOL?

He wasnt hugely popular with my female friends that evening, and the men let him off with a yellow card, relieved that it wasnt them this time delivering the lead balloon that would put them in the doghouse. And today its OK because we all still laugh about it. Because today I am infertile. Quite militantly so in fact. And he didnt leave me, he married me, probably to prove that he was joking after all, but maybe also because we fell madly in love.

It was funny to him at the time precisely because it seemed so unlikely. Needless to say, I didnt spend my childhood imagining infertility for myself. But, thats only the case until you end up on the wrong end of the fertility spectrum, do some research and discover that it actually affects one in seven couples and counting. Or talked to your friends about it and discovered that their routes to parenthood have, almost without exception, been nowhere near as easy as our old text books would have had us believe.

I certainly didnt expect to spend the entirety of my thirties battling cancer, regrowing my wonderfully uncooperative hair and then battling infertility because make no mistake, it is a battle of epic proportions. Only to flop into a whole new decade ten years older, wiser, totally different and with the realisation that whatever happens next, Ill probably be aghast, appalled and amazed for the rest of all time.

When I decided to write a regular Times newspaper column about my surrogacy journey (I hate that word but there really is no other word that works as well as that one), it is because I was as interested in the journey (gah!) from the outside as I was dreading it from the inside. The hurdles we have faced emotionally are still smarting, but good God theyre objectively interesting too. Writing in short recaps has led me to understand the breadth of the issues with women and our fertility. How perhaps reproducing is increasingly less compatible with our outrageously busy lives. And how in telling bits of my story, Ive helped others understand or accept theirs.

With topics as divergent as infertility and surrogacy there will always be questions, and I think I have probably heard them all. So, here, for posterity (mine) and practicality (yours) Id like to answer the big ones. The ones youve probably thought about yourself once or twice, or your friend or colleague, maybe your sister or aunt or maybe even me.

Dealing with infertility isnt easy, but it is definitely possible. With bells on in fact, because now that Im here I couldnt imagine it any other way.

This is the story of my adventur No, no, too rip-roaring. Of my experience? Nope, too emotionless. The story of my odysse Way too ridiculously excessive. This is the story of my journey. I hope this telling the in-depth one, the practical, pragmatic and personal one will ultimately be a story of resilience and hope for anyone facing their own Mother Project.

Someone professionally straightforward tells you youre infertile, thats how you know. Perhaps in a medical facility of the standard nondescript variety, like this one Im in right now. Nondescript, but already in the top two most hideous rooms Ive ever sat in, nonetheless. Currently I cant hear anything except the whooshing of my own blood that happens sometimes when youre delivered earth-tiltingly bad news that you werent really expecting. Unfortunately, this aint my first rodeo. My husband Mr B is definitely saying something soothing, because hes rubbing my back whilst doing so, but Im deafened by hot white noise and instead focus on his adams apple bobbing as he gulps something down repeatedly ah yes, the taste of abject disappointment and distress. Thats because this just happened:

Im afraid your ultrasound showed no ovarian function, in fact your left ovary was not visible at all. And your AMH and FSH blood test results also demonstrate that you are infertile.

Infertile. A somewhat vague diagnosis that kind of makes the room warp in on itself while Mr B rubs my back, and no one rubs his. My hearing returns just in time to catch him saying, Well, youve been through worse, eh? Oh Christ, I should have stayed deaf. In this moment, when Im imagining my future hurtling down a toilet, its safest to avoid comment. I glare at the poor man and then at the doctor. Dispassionate doctor with your face set to patiently waiting for news to register whilst preparing leaflets on egg donation. OK, yes, I have literally speaking been through worse: the breast cancer, chemo and radiation that apparently fried my fertility and put me in this position in the first place. But still, I dont think its appropriate to park me anywhere on the bad news emotional acceptance scale whilst Im smack bang in the middle of processing this bit. Right now, as a woman finally ready to start celebrating my traitorous body again by making a baby with my lovely husband,