Making the decision to walk away from IVF

A story of making an impossible choice, and how I did it.

Afterglow is about embracing the joys of a life that maybe hasn’t turned out as planned, and how leaving fertility treatments without a baby is still a happy ending. I also write about rethinking the fertility experience and treatment narrative.

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The cup and soul-filling location I found myself in the weeks after our final IVF cycle didn’t work

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Ok, this is a personal one friends. Probably the most personal any of my pieces have been so far. I’ve rewritten and taken things out, and put them back in several times. I am probably going to have a huge vulnerability hangover after I press publish on this.

But I keep on coming back to who I was and where I was a few years ago. In the throes of cycle after cycle of not falling pregnant, failed fertility treatments and IVF, longing for the stories of those who were living full, healthy and happy lives despite not getting the baby. Wondering how on earth to know when I should call it and move forward with a different type of life.

This piece is for that slightly younger version of me and anyone else who might be in a similar place, and longing for what I longed for.

Stories from people who made an impossible choice. A choice that lacks support, compassion and understanding.

Stories of how they made that choice.

Stories of what their life is life now.

There aren’t enough of these stories out there, but here is a little of mine.

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Where it started…

As a young girl I always thought I would have kids. I would get married, but not too young (I wanted to get a degree, travel and build a career after all), and I’d have two kids, probably in my early to mid 30’s.

It’s not like I dreamed and longed for a white fairy tale wedding, a house in the suburbs and a few kids. Travel, adventure and independence have always been core values and things I prioritised in my 20’s, but I just assumed that I would get married and have a few kids - because, well, that’s what you did. We are each born into a family of some kind, and the Mum and Dad with two or three kids is the dominant family construct. There were no positive role models of women living a different type of life, within my own world, or in society broadly. Pronatalism and glorification of traditional family life is the soup we swim in.

I’m also a millennial who came of age during the ‘girl-boss’, ‘women can have it all’ era. We were told we could have the big careers and the family life, conditioned to bend and push ourselves in their pursuit, in a world built for men.

My partner and I met at 34, both having been with the wrong people in our 20’s. In the first year or two of our relationship, I wasn’t thinking about babies at all, which could be unusual for a mid-30’s woman who had previously had undergone fertility treatment that failed (a story for another day).

At this point I had actually started to take pride in my nonchalance towards having kids. I witnessed my friends become tired and exasperated, parenting sleepless babies and toddlers, working through changing relationship dynamics, and navigating professional jobs and young families in a working world that is still largely set up for families that have a primary non-working caregiver.

The mental load and juggle just seemed impossible to an outsider. Maybe this was the version of themselves they were bringing to me? Maybe they were being kind and not sharing all of the joyous parts of parenting and family life with their newly divorced friend.

Had I actually shrugged the weight of my age off, loosened the grip of the previous felt conditioning to create a nuclear family?

Coming full circle

Whilst most of my friends’ lives looked like this, I was enjoying my newly upgraded life and relationship, and all the people and activities that were a part of that. But then, ever so slowly, things started to shift. Maybe it was time in the relationship. Realising what a great dad he would be. Maybe it was my age. Slowly the thought of having a child with this man made all the parts of parenting that I used to think sounded impossible and not worth trading my life for, sound desirable.

The decision to start trying wasn’t taken lightly. The backdrop of covid, and more seriously, climate change were major sources of anxiety in the decision. Finally, my younger sister and a few of our closest friends of similar ages had babies.

I googled many times late at night ‘how do I know if I should have kids?’ I eventually decided that not having my own kids scared me more than the thought of having them. Is this a good enough rationale for choosing to try and have a baby?

I don’t know whether trying to achieve something and not getting it makes you want the thing harder. I don’t know whether it was time. But the more we tried, and failed, the more the longing for our family grew. The nonchalance towards having kids was quickly being replaced with a burning longing to create the very thing I had only very recently taken pride in railing against.

With the very helpful diagnosis of unexplained infertility, a diagnosis I already knew well, I found myself back on the fertility treatment train at 38 years old.

I’m not going to go into the detail and number of cycles here, but let’s just say there were several. I knew what to expect, as I’d paid a visit to infertility station in the past.

But this time, it was going to work. I knew it was going to work. I had chalked up my previous lack of success to being with the wrong person. It was fate, the universe looking out for me. There was just no way it wasn’t going to work this time. You don’t hear those stories, right?

It never crossed my mind that we weren’t going to have the baby we’d put so much careful thought and consideration into deciding we wanted. Yes I was in my late 30’s, but I was fit and healthy, and my Mum had me at 35 and my sister at 40!

After several rounds of failed treatment and two early miscarriages, the fate narrative I had created started to slowly implode in my face, stealing my hope and positivity. What I thought was my very conscious, rational decision to have a child, free from any social conditioning and people pleasing that had had sneakily hid behind my previous attempts, was being taken away from me. Infertility was robbing me of the right to make that choice.

Making space for an alternative outcome

I took a break and a holiday, focussed on my health and started to feel more myself again within a few months. It was around this time that I also started allowing myself to loosen the grip on what a successful outcome looked like.

After switching specialists and demanding transparency into the medical stats for women like me, I was a lot more clued in. I’d been through loss, grief, hope and then loss and grief again and I now knew the odds were far from being in our favour.

Whilst I remained hopeful, and did everything that felt reasonable to me to optimise our chances, I started actively envisioning a future without kids, as much as I envisioned the future with kids. Allowing myself to go there, and I mean really go there.

I started looking for stories of people who had left fertility treatment without the ‘outcome’. I craved stories of hope and positivity from the other side, and that other side meaning the one we don’t hear about enough - the one where people don’t end up with a baby. I looked for stories of people who made a decision to leave fertility treatment without the baby, and I found hardly any. I delved into spaces with people who had consciously chosen not to have kids. Whilst I did find some of these discussions helpful, some of them were also very anti-natalist, a position that I do not hold or agree with any more than the pro-natalist position.

I took time to really and truly invest in myself and establish a sense of happiness and hope, regardless of what may lie in our future that I can’t control. It was messy at times and included lots of time with myself, therapy, coaching, and mindset work. It was about rediscovering what is important to me, who I want to be, learning, healing and growing.

I worked on envisioning the future me, and I envisioned the future child agnostic, and by that I mean I envisioned the future me neither with nor without kids. I visualised and wrote about who I wanted to be in the future. I wrote pages and pages in my journal. How do I think? How do I feel? What do I wear? What kind of relationships do I have in my life? Where do I live? What do I do that lights me up, and how does that make me feel? By doing this, I was able to disconnect my happiness from being dependant on having my own kid/s, and what society deems to be a normal family.

I talked endlessly with a therapist about my perceived choices conundrum;

"I really want a dog, but what if a baby comes along soon after, a puppy and a baby would be too much?!” (we were grieving the loss of my soul doggo a few months prior).

“I’m yearning for an extended trip, but we can’t plan that now, what if we fall pregnant?”

I can’t remember her words exactly, but the gist of it was, just get the bloody dog! Go on the bloody trip! Or at least plan the trip. You never know what is around the corner, you have to do what makes you happy.

I’d always considered myself to be someone that chases things that make me happy, but it’s crazy what happens to a women’s brain when she’s in her late 30’s and trying to conceive.

I started to allow myself to envision practically what my life would look like without kids. My partner and I spoke about the trips we would take. We loosely planned for a gap year in the future, where we would rent our house out and travel around Central and South America.

I started thinking about the upgrades I would make to our little home if we didn’t end up having to sell and upgrade to something with more space for a baby and eventually a teenager.

I started planning on how I could reduce my working hours so I could be there more for my niece when she started school, to help my sister with pick ups and to work on passion projects (like building this community and blog!) and other things that bring joy and purpose outside my 9-5.

Some people might argue that I wasn’t manifesting hard enough (I write about the harmful ‘never give up hope’ narrative here), that envisioning a future that didn’t have a baby was ruining my chances.

I strongly felt this was necessary to better equip me if faced with a choice to walk away from IVF. I wanted to be able to make this choice from a logical, rational and emotional place.

Getting clarity

It was after starting this transformational mindset work that I made the decision with my partner that the next IVF cycle would be the last one. I was ready for it and optimistic, but also prepared and ready to move on with a different life if we had to. Incredibly, I was excited for the cycle to start, because I was SO excited for it to be over. I was excited to have clarity on a path forward, whatever that path looked like. It was for this reason, that final cycle was probably the most relaxed I felt out of any of my cycles. I had done everything I could to increase our chances and was in the best place mentally, physically and emotionally. I was ready for any outcome.

When the clinic called to say there wasn’t a single viable embryo to transfer I was almost a little shocked at my emotional reaction to the news. Yes I was disappointed and incredibly sad, but I’d also been coming to terms with and grieving this possibility in the months leading up to this. I’d been processing that outcome as much as I was processing and hoping that it would work. I was READY for it. I was ready for anything.

This post isn’t a post about grief, maybe I’ll talk about that more another time. But I wouldn’t be doing this story justice without mentioning it. Grief is a funny beast, which anyone who has experienced any kind of loss would understand. After the initial high and relief of our IVF journey being over, there has been periods of sadness and grief, but those times are becoming fewer. The grief grows with you.

I’m sure if I had a baby, I would be grieving a version of myself that was lost to make room for the new mother version of me. Just like I’m grieving motherhood, which is a necessary loss to make room for the amazing future version of me I am becoming.

In the weeks following the last cycle not working, my wonderful friend Ceire from The Fertility Mama shared this clip from Harvard Psychology Professor Dr Ellen Langer:

As Dr Langer says I can’t know what it’s like to live a life with kids so I can’t make a comparison. I made the decision to walk away from IVF, and the decision is right. If the professor who is also know as the “mother of mindfulness” and the “mother of positive psychology” says so, that’s more than good enough reassurance for me.

Funnily enough, it’s been about 9 months since that call from the clinic. So I guess you could say in the last 9 months instead of growing a baby, I’ve been growing and birthing myself. Now I get to nurture and parent myself through the next chapter, and I can’t wait to see what it holds.

Oh and I got the bloody dog too. Best decision ever.

Thanks for reading my work. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, or in my DMs.

Take care,

Katie x