I’m a loser baby so why don’t you kill me

Originally I wasn’t going to write about this.  It was too edgy.  To painful. To.to.to – whatever.  No one likes to talk about failure, loss, or “this process not working”.  But the fact is for some egg donation isn’t going to work.  It’s just not.  Some women aren’t going to be able to carry a child for a myriad of reasons, and will need to rely on a gestational carrier.  And there will be some women who can’t afford to contract with a gestational carrier.  There will also be those who can’t afford to adopt, or choose not to adopt.  And there will be those who after all of this will still be without a child.

With all that being said – failure is something we need to talk about.  Regardless of how painful it is, it’s real, it’s here, and it’s in our faces. - Marna Gatlin

There’s no two ways about it – there is a special and unique circle of hell not even listed on Dante’s Circle of hell for those of us who are trying valiantly, earnestly, and desperately to have a child regardless of the path we take to get there. 

Most of us (unless we were given the devastating news at a young age) didn’t anticipate having to struggle, bargain, or fight this hard to have a child.  But here we are perplexed, angry, shocked, and sad that our bodies aren’t doing what millions of other female bodies are doing – conceiving and having a baby.  I remember clearly hearing the sound of denial in my voice when I heard the words:

“Marna, the best chance for  you to have a baby is through egg donation because you have an egg quality problem.”

This was at the tender age of 35, when my belly should have been swollen with child not swollen with the latest round of IVF drugs.

For some we have waited until later in life to begin building a family, no one told us that we needed to jump on the baby making wagon, after all we see all kinds of public figures from all walks of life way up until their mid-forties and some even beyond having children we think with no problem. 

No one whispered to us as we were putting in long hours at the office, directing projects, maybe looking for Mr. or Mrs. Right, going over legal briefs, treating patients as physicians, catching flight after flight for our job, or furthering our career, that we wouldn’t or couldn’t have a baby when we were ready.

NO ONE TOLD US.

So here we are at the crossroads of what the “eff” am I going to do when we discover that there is this amazing way to become a mother – by taking the eggs of a younger woman and creating an embryo and placing that embryo back into our waiting uterus's.  

 

Should be simple and straightforward, right?

We wade through the emotional and psychological part to “all of this”.  We wrestle with our genetic link loss.  We mourn the loss of our genetics.  We worry that our child(ren)  that we finally have are going to resent us some day.  We worry about what others will think of our choices in regards to the way we have chosen to create our family. We worry about acceptance.

We worry.  We worry. We worry.

We then come to a place where we can wrap our heads around this amazing technology, we have become out of the box thinkers, ready to take on the world and become mothers --And we put our money, our hearts, our soul, our lives, on the line for this.  Many of us have stopped our careers, decided to cash in retirement accounts, borrow money, take 2^nd jobs – we have invested our entire beings into this quest to have this baby.

Our baby.

The baby.

The baby, the baby, the baby.

No problem – right?

Well, for some of us it’s no problem.  Things work like they are supposed to with this young embryo, and before we know it, we are mothers with these amazing babies, and we are happy standing around singing Kumbayah, and feeling all mother earthy, and we realize this is what it’s about. 

This is what it’s about.

But for others, many others who think that egg donation is their silver bullet, and they try and for whatever reason the cycle fails, and then they try again, and the cycle fails, or the cycle works and sadly they miscarry, sometimes over and over again.  They then go back to their doctors and their doctor say “It’s a fluke, we don’t know why this didn’t work it should have worked, maybe we need more testing, and we really need to try again”

We leave their offices dejected and uttering “what.the.???” We are frustrated, sad, angry, and more over confused. After all we must be complete and total losers because we can’t even have a baby with a goddamn donor egg. Right?

Wrong.  You are not a loser. What’s happening isn’t your fault.  There is no easy answer for any of this.  And the reality is you might never carry a child to term – but that doesn’t make you a loser or less than, or not as good as.

It just means your body isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.

And I really wish I could fix that.