When did I know I wanted to have a baby? I was ten years old and my mother and I were in the hallway waiting for the elevator. I was negotiating a purchase of something or other and probably wasn’t all that reasonable about it. The neighbor made some comment about the youth of today and gave me a look. It upset me. My mother said: "It’s OK, she doesn’t understand, she never had children." I remember thinking to myself, I never want to not understand.

I guess I have the usual single woman story of waiting and waiting and waiting and hoping that the next man I meet will be the right one. I thought I would be definitely married and pregnant, by the time I was thirty-seven. But none of the relationships of my early thirties were strong enough, and I was also in the midst of a career change. So my thirty-seventh birthday came and went, and the baby was nowhere in sight. Finally, I was almost thirty-nine, I met someone, who I thought I could have a child with. I was quite up-front about it. Soon after we met I told him that having children was important to me.. I was around 39 then. He said: "Oh yes, I want to have children too…some day. But I want to do a few other things first." Of course, I should have known right then and there, that he was not dad material. Still, we got involved and stayed involved for two years. It wasn’t the best relationship and I knew after about two months that it was not going to work out. But I kept hoping that maybe we could still have a child together. And if it didn’t work out, we could still co-parent. As it turns out, I am so happy I didn’t do that, because the idea of sharing a child with someone, who you are not getting along with, is really awful. So, we broke up and soon after that I, started thinking, OK - how am I going to get pregnant? .

I thought about the various options available for single women who want to have children. You could just go sleep with someone. You can talk to friends and see if they will either sleep with you or donate sperm. You can have some kind of known donor agreement, or you can go to a sperm bank. I live in Boston, and the day after I decided to actively start the search for a sperm bank I found out about an organization called Single Mothers by Choice. I went to a meeting. Connecting with other women who were doing this was great; it made the idea of being able to do this on my own more real.

Soon after the meeting I started consulting doctors, and doing a bunch of tests. I had no idea what these tests meant. There was a whole panel of them, FSH, LH, To me, it was just a checklist. I had no idea that these things had any significance whatsoever. One day, I was in the hospital with a friend who was having a gallbladder operation. I remember sitting at the payphone in the hallway calling my gynecologist about test results. I could tell from the tone of her voice that something was wrong. "I’m so sorry," she said to me. She sounded like there was a death in the family. She told me that my FSH was 17, and that that was bad news. She didn’t exactly say this, but what I took from her manner was – you’re never going to have children. I was hysterical. Here I was, after years of thinking about it, finally ready to take action and somebody was saying to me to not even bother, to just forget it. I was hysterical all weekend. But by Monday I decided that I was going to try to get pregnant no matter what. This test was not going to stop me from trying. So I immediately made and appointment with a fertility specialist. When I saw her I told her that I will work with her under two conditions: she had to be optimistic, and she was not going to test my FSH. She was fine with all of that. So, whether she was actually optimistic or just optimistic because I told her that she had to be, I don’t know. All I know she had a very positive attitude. And that was helpful. We went ahead and, since I didn’t have a partner, we did an insemination in her office. We just did a natural cycle and it didn’t work. I was pretty devastated and stressed out. I went to Barnes and Noble, looking for books and I found Inconceivable. For me it was like somebody was telling me to trust my own instincts and not listen to people who tell me that I can’t do what I want to do. Here was this woman with a higher FSH than mine, with doctors who didn’t even want to work with her. And still she kept going. It really resonated with me. Of course I had a lot of negative thoughts as well but it strengthened my determination to do whatever was in my power.

I went back to my RE and we did one more cycle without drugs. In the meanwhile I started doing a lot of the things Julia talked about in the book. I was eating better. I started going to a Yoga class in my neighborhood. I tried a Clomid cycle, which had the affect that it apparently has on women over forty. It thinned my uterine lining. So we didn’t use that again. We went straight to the hard stuff. We used Pergonal. It didn’t work. Around the same time I found out that Julia was teaching a workshop and one of the women from my support group suggested we go. I wept through every one of the exercises in the workshop. By that point it felt like I had been trying forever. I let go of a lot of grief in those three hours. I had stopped drinking coffee a year and a half earlier but after the workshop I paid even more attention to what I was eating. I redoubled my efforts. I actually went out and started drinking vegetable juices and wheatgrass.

The next cycle I did was with Repronex. I did it from day three of my cycle for eleven days. I had to do the injections myself. It actually didn’t hurt me. Some people say it hurts, but it didn’t hurt me. One of the things Julia talked about in the workshop was that if you decided that you needed to use drugs, you should work with some imagery and visualize the drugs and the procedure as a positive experience; as something that will help you get what you want. I did the injections every night at eleven. Some people have to do it twice a day, but I only did it once a day. I conceived Ariane that cycle.

Looking back, I give myself a lot of credit for sticking it all out. It was not an easy year. There were so many different things I needed to attend to. I had to work to make money. At the same time I had to try to find a job that was going to cover treatment.

When I started out, it was about $1,500 just to do the basic blood work. A course of the drugs was around $2,000, plus inseminations and ultrasound. I didn’t have that kind of money. I was trying to find companies that had infertility benefits, so that I could tailor my job search to those. After my job search, I was on the internet trying to get information about what kind of protocols people were using; what drugs were best for which conditions; trying to read medical articles about infertility; and figure out what would work best. I felt like I had to do this, and present the information to my R.E. I had a very nice R.E., but half the time I would come in and she would say: "Well, what do you want to do next?" I thought, wait a minute, you’re the doctor, you tell me. Until I realized that I couldn’t really depend on her to make the right choice. I had to do the leg work myself. It seemed like to her it was sort of, six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Tough as it was, all I have to do is look at this little bundle and know it was worth every ounce of effort. I’d do it all again in a flash. This was something I had to go through. I am an only child and I had a strong need to have a connection, a genetic connection to someone on this planet.