We got married in ’95, just before my thirty-fifth birthday. Soon after, I decided to go off birth control. I was not really in a hurry to get pregnant. I’m an architect, and my career had just started taking off. Part of me was wondering what would happen to my identity if I became a mom. Almost a year went by, and I was still pretty easy-going about it. I wanted it to just be something that would happen in its own time. At the end of that year I decided to see my OB-GYN to see if anything was wrong. Looking back, I now realize that she did all the testing at the wrong time in my cycle, She also tested Eric, and we didn’t get his results for six months. I kept calling and finally I got her on the phone and said: "You know I run a service business and I want you to know you and your staff are just not cutting it." She said, "Oh, thank you so much, it’s so nice to get that feedback. I’ll look into it immediately." And of course, nothing changed. It was quite a lesson for me.

At a friend’s recommendation we saw Dr. S. in New York. His suggestion was to go right into IVF. For the first IVF cycle, they gave me the highest dose of drugs possible and I still only produced four or five eggs. Dr S. told me I was a low responder. Prior to the second cycle they put me on birth control in order to regulate it. They ended up canceling that cycle because I didn’t have enough eggs. Later I felt that putting me on birth control the month before was not a good decision. Also, they didn’t need to take it to the eleventh hour to cancel that cycle. It was a poorly managed process. We decided it was time to look for another clinic.

Right around that time I became part of a mind-body group, which was mostly useful because I connected with other women who were going through this. That’s where I first heard about Inconceivable. The things Julia talked about in that book made so much sense to me. It’s funny, I’m a terrible dieter, but I never saw her suggestions about food, as a diet. I just said to myself, I have to be good to myself. And it was surprisingly easy because at that point it was so nice to have something to do that felt healthy. I started eating mostly organic vegetables and fruit, I eliminated all red meat, I started juicing and drinking wheatgrass. For the first time in my life I decided that I was going to get eight hours of sleep a night. So, I would literally say: "What time is it? Okay, we’re going to bed at eleven, that means I can set the clock for seven." I mean I started thinking, this is my priority, I need to take care of me. A lot of that was inspired by Julia’s book.

In our search for a clinic we decided that the statistics didn’t matter to us. We wanted a team that worked with problem cases, since clearly, I was not an easy fix. At the initial consultation, Dr G said to us that thirty five to forty percent of his patients were women who had not been accepted into other clinics. So, that spoke my language. I also had a good feeling about him as a person.

One day my friend Lisa called and suggested we go to a Resolve conference. We met Julia Indichova there and picked up a flyer about her workshop. We both went into the workshop expecting basically a set of instructions: this is what you should eat, this is where you go for a colonic, etc… And although there certainly was a lot of information like that, my favorite parts were the various exercises, and discussion.

I canceled the IVF cycle, after the workshop. A couple of months earlier we had done our third IVF with the new clinic and it didn’t work. Our doctor said we could do another one right away but after the workshop I realized I was not ready for it emotionally or spiritually. One of the things I got from Julia was the idea that I was the expert. It was something that at first didn’t make a lot of sense to me, it was really very foreign to think of myself as the authority. But as I continued to work in the group I gradually began to trust myself more; to feel, yeah, with this process I am the expert. And I decided that after having put my body through all those hormones I needed a break.

I was in Julia’s support group close to three months. The space in the group felt very safe and whole. Julia had a way of focusing on someone and going right to whatever the issue was with that person. She had a level of honesty and clear-sightedness that felt so healthy to me. It was the kind of space that I wanted to be able to keep creating for myself. I also loved the imagery exercises. I had tried visualizations before, but I was always left with this feeling that I couldn’t really quiet my mind down enough to do them. This time they were very immediate, they came out of whatever we were talking about at the moment. And when I would start to do them at home, I changed them and they became my own. The exercise that ended up being really powerful for me was being in the center of a group of women and having each of those women say something - whatever message they would want to share with me. I recreated that for myself a lot. And it changed – at some point, I saw myself walking up a mountainside and there were women along the way to help me up. And each of them had a gift for the baby, gifts like laughter, and love. I can cry thinking about it; these were all women that I loved and a number of them had died.

By the time the next IVF cycle came around I was in a very different place emotionally. Also my doctor at this new clinic did a couple of things that I thought were smart. First, he did more hormonal testing up front in the first five days of the cycle. Because he said that every cycle is different and you want to make sure that before you embark on the process, you have the best cycle. He also did a number of sonograms to make sure that there weren’t any eggs that were already too far along. He said, "We’re just going to make sure that this is the right month, because we’re not in some outrageous hurry." And then he tested very carefully when the eggs should be released. This was quite different from the clinic we had worked with previously, where they routinely treated the eggs on day eleven. Dr. G. treated them on day seventeen. They just let them grow. I felt it was much more tailored to me, rather than following some arbitrary schedule.

After the retrieval I came back to the group and I said that I was disappointed, because I thought I would produce more eggs but they only retrieved two. And Julia said, "You only need one, one good egg."

It turned out that both eggs fertilized. They did the transfer and I was supposed to stay on the table for an hour afterwards. Eric had to make a call and I found myself doing an imagery exercise. I visualized my womb as this very warm and welcoming place for the embryos, with soft lighting, the lining of the womb was plush red sofas and my heartbeat was the music in the background. And there were these two embryos. One of them was a ten cell and one was a four cell. I had this mental image of these two strivers, the big, strong ten cell just swimming along, heading towards the music. And the little four cell who was like a shrimp, but it had the spirit, it was going to keep up with its sibling, trying really hard, swimming upstream. It was very real, very powerful. It was the most magical moment. I spent that weekend just lying around and resting and every once in a while I would repeat that visualization. It felt very good to do it, I didn’t feel I was pushing myself in any way.

During the waiting period I was at my parents’ country house, and I was convinced that it didn’t work because I started getting cramps. I remember saying to Eric, "Don’t get your hopes up, I feel like I’m going to get my period."

There is one more important detail. In my very first IVF cycle they misread the data. They told me I was pregnant and they called me five hours later and said I wasn’t. And then the third IVF, the first one at the new clinic, they told me I had a low reading. They said, "You know, it’s possible that you could be pregnant, but the reading is low, we’ll have to test again in a few days." It turned out the reading was something like seventeen. They didn’t explain to me how really low that was.

So, this time we did our blood test on a Friday morning and in the afternoon I called the clinic. And they said – we have a very good reading. They told me the reading was 1,039. And I couldn’t understand it. I started to sob. I literally couldn’t understand going from seventeen to 1,039. I was sobbing and asking the nurse: "What does this number mean?" It took me a while to trust it. Everyone else around me was very optimistic, but it took a while to believe that it was real.

Ann’s daughter, Ellie, was born on April 26, 2000