There is an old cliché that says love only happens when you stop searching for it. I never expected this to be true of fertility, too. It was in early 2021 that I began experiencing strange and unexplainable breast pain. My GP had reassured me it wasn’t something sinister, but I also didn’t connect it to the possibility of being pregnant. It had been a tough year, and one precious yet ultimately unsuccessful cycle of IVF meant that my husband and I had been working to come to terms with a child-free future – for the sake of our hearts and our sanity.
Because I’d been through so many emotions during our struggle to conceive, I was strangely floored when I took a pregnancy test – “just in case,” I told myself – and the result was positive. Any joy I felt was complex and tentative and accompanied by the mantra I’d repeated to myself for months: “Maybe I was never supposed to have a baby.” Guilt, anxiety and second-guessing myself came hot on its heels.
