One of the best things I did when I started to realize having a baby would be harder than I thought was to start a blog about it. One, because I like attention, and two, I didn’t know anyone going through fertility issues in real life. Throughout my journey, I’ve kept a public blog and I still get several emails a month from other women who have gone through infertility and most of them have questions centered around my daughter’s conception. Namely the method my husband and I used to have her.
My daughter came into this world because of an egg donor.
This all came about because in 2014, my third round of IVF failed. We were two years in the trenches of hard-core fertility treatments. When I was notified of my negative pregnancy result, I knew the time had come to say goodbye to my own eggs. We had spent months weighing the pros and cons already and it was a decision we made that came with a lot of tears, anger, and resentment — mostly from me. There was a lot of different avenues we could have pursued, but in the end, it was going to be an egg donor.
It took two rounds and another tens of thousands of dollars, but in early 2015, I got pregnant, and I stayed pregnant — something I wasn’t able to do before.
As my pregnancy progressed, so did my complex emotions surrounding The Donor Thing, as it became known. Mostly, I was super happy. Sometimes I struggled. Who would this little baby be? Would I recognize myself in her? Would people make a whole bunch of awkward comments about who she looks like when they meet her for the first time? Would she feel like my own baby?
Read the rest of this post over at What to Expect.
