How I Navigated Donor Conception by Tia Brown
My journey with infertility started when I was diagnosed with Premature Ovarian Insufficiency (POI) at the age of 29 after 18 months of trying to conceive naturally. We were very naively unaware of any fertility issues, but after 18 months of negative pregnancy tests followed by our first round IVF with my own eggs without a single embryo, we were shocked to hear the news that we should consider an alternative route to parenthood. But at the time it seemed too soon to let go of the dreams we once had and what we thought our route to parenthood would look like. But after another two rounds of IVF attempted with my own eggs and again not a single embryo and my ovaries no longer responding the decision to continue was out of our control.
We were faced with a life changing decision whether to live a childfree life, or pursue our path to parenthood via egg donor conception or adoption. Even though after our first round of IVF I had started researching egg donor conception and trying to process this, I never really thought it would be our reality as we never lost hope of what we originally thought our dream was.
Me and Lee (My husband) spent sleepless nights processing this news for weeks on end, and so on discussing our options we always knew our dream and our end goal was to have children together so living a childfree life at that time was not an option for us. I did not want Lee to go through the pain & grief I was going through whilst trying to process losing my genetics, as I wanted Lee to have children that he was genetically connected to even though I couldn’t so this was how we came to the decision to pursue our path to parenthood via egg donor conception.
Surprisingly to me Lee took longer to accept not being able to have a child sharing both our genetics, he was grieving a dream he once had with me. I found grieving the loss of my genetics very challenging, and it severally affected my mental health as I did not know to deal with this grief. It wasn’t only the grief of loosing my genetics but also the grief around a dream I once had with Lee, the grief around my donor being able to do something I couldn’t do and the grief of the loss of a less complicated future for our family.
We spent time listening to podcasts, watching webinars, from both parents of donor conceived people and donor conceived adults, had donor implications counselling and we both had counselling to help us process this and see what our future may look like
Through the support of the donor conception community on Instagram, the online resources available, and counselling (and obviously our fertility clinic), the dreams we never knew we had came true!
When we finally became parents to our Twins Maliyah and Kawhi I soon realised it was never my dream to have children I share a genetic connection with, but my dream was always to be their mum! My path to parenthood changed but my end destination and outcome never changed!