I sometimes wish people could see inside my head at the constant turmoil I have with myself. If I had more money I would do IVF again. It caused me so much pain and anguish but the hope is calling out to me again, I am finding it so hard to give up that we will never have children of my own, I will never know the feeling of a baby growing inside me, I will never go through that life changing experience of holding a new born baby and knowing that it's yours, I will never get to see what our baby would look like or which of our characteristic it would have. People might say it's only money, do it! but we cannot afford it, we would have to go into debt, being childless doesn't make you rich, we have spent money on holidays, experiences things that make us feel better but they were all frugally spent. If we had saved up for the last two years instead of these holidays we actually still wouldn't have enough for IVF and we would probably have gone mad.
As a childless couple you feel like you don't belong anywhere in society, your on the outside looking in at what life is supposed to be like, for self preservation you distance yourself from people with children so it doesn't hurt so much, you can't join in with conversations about having kids. I have built up a shield I want to travel and try new things, somethings that people with children may find difficult to do and whilst we are travelling and doing all these different things I feel great and I wouldn't trade it for anything but you can't do these things constantly.
When you're at home in the day to day you realise there is something missing and it hurts, it's like a grief but there is no death, no body to mourn, nobody sees the pain or understands it. I still have not come to terms with it, I try not to think about it or look on the bright side of life but it effects me daily. I'm not looking for sympathy I just want people to understand why I am like I am, why I find it so hard to be around pregnant women or babies or people with children it's not because I don't care it's because I'm sad and yes I'm jealous and it makes me feel like a horrible person.
We could go into debt for a chance to have a baby, We might try and try and try and never have a baby then I would have nothing left at the end but a debt that I have pay back and that stops us getting on with our lives.
On the other hand I could try and try and try and it could work we would still be in debt and struggle having all the extra cost of bringing up a child and paying off a debt.
Not enough is done to help people who go through IVF, the first IVF was funded through the nhs, when we first started trying the funding was for three lots of IVF but by the time it came around to us having it it had been cut to one. This put immense pressure on us hoping that everything would go right the first time. The second we only could do with by doing egg sharing to keep the costs down and Matt's mum and dad paid for it. Egg sharing can halve the cost of IVF but you have to give away half of your eggs that are retrieved at the egg collection -if you get an odd number, say 7 the person you are sharing with will get 4 and you will get 3 this is obviously before insemination and there is a chance that the fertilisation won't work, out of 3 we had two embryos which we had put back. The other thing that is quite hard is that you have to write a letter to the child that could be born from the donated egg explaining a bit about yourself and why you donated the egg, this is because upon their 18th birthday they can legally find out about you. This is awful it feels like you are writing a letter to a child you have given up. Something I'd never want to do. I could, if I wanted find out if my donated egg resulted in a birth, I have not yet done this and I don't know whether I will. So if I decide to do it again I also have to decide whether to go through this.
You might think 'just adopt a child' but it would still mean coming to terms with not being able to give birth to our own child which is also so hard to think about.
I flit from one idea to another of what to do, all the time I'm getting older and will I at some point look back and regret my decision if I don't try again. Or someday realise I've been thinking about it so much I've missed my opportunity. I wish we didn't have these decisions to make, we are so indecisive at the best of times. I don't know what I hope to gain from telling you all this, no one can help us or tell us what to do we just have to make that decision ourselves. I think I just hope to be understood a little bit better, it's not something that's really spoken about so it can feel very lonely at times.
