When Motherhood Is Deferred: Falling in Love with My Longing
by Emma Cother
Up until six months ago, I only remember glimpses of time where I wasn’t being strangled by a desire to have a child. After years of – egg freezing procedures, multiple failed IVF treatments, a litany of allopathic and alternative medicine approaches – I’ve progressed to being a 41-year-old woman with a “diagnosis” of unexplained infertility.
“My inability to conceive was shredding my soul. Each of my doctors had an opinion and a solution until they didn’t.”
Up until six months ago, I felt utterly broken. My inability to conceive was shredding my soul. Each of my doctors had an opinion and a solution until they didn’t. And then I’d suffer the whiplash of their simultaneous certainty and uncertainty. Unexplained infertility, a diagnosis faced by 30% of couples unable to carry a full-term pregnancy, means that the experts are certain I’m infertile but clueless about the cause.
The “I don’t know” response in western medicine is generally the end of the road. What fertility specialist wants to sully their publicly available data on success rates with deeper investigations into the mystery of women like me? Women who fall outside the realms of a straightforward clinical solution and therefore, fall outside of the way in which the fertility industry is currently run. Women who are outliers.
“Despite billions of dollars of investment, no one can describe how and why conception happens for some but not others. “
Despite billions of dollars of investment, no one can describe how and why conception happens for some but not others. All the variables can be controlled but there’s something that can only be inadequately described as grace that occurs when a child is conceived.
The marriage of medical science with the mystery of our bodies is rarely, if ever, unpacked. Whilst I have been heartened by emerging mainstream acknowledgement of the bio/psycho/social/cultural/spiritual elements of terminal and chronic diseases, I had never come across anyone who regarded a fertility challenge with the same thoughtful, holistic depth.
No one asked me, “have you considered what your body may be trying to tell you by not being able to sustain a healthy pregnancy?” No one, until six months ago, when I found Julia Indichova and her Fertile Heart practice.
For over two decades, Julia’s been posing this and countless other thoughtful questions to people all over the world, shattered by systems that have repeatedly failed them. Having faced a hopeless diagnosis herself and finding answers, as she puts it, by learning to “feel, think, choose and act for herself” she’s been supporting others in claiming their own inner fertility authority.
And while she’s been patiently holding space, thousands of people with the most hopeless of cases in the traditional sense, have welcomed healthy babies with the support of her profound tools, support circles and wisdom. They’ve welcomed them via a plethora of routes- natural conception, IVF, egg donation, surrogacy and adoption – for Julia helps people navigate their own most truthful path to a child, without judgement, whatever that may be.
Finding Julia’s website in the depths of the night, was an act of grace. That first night reading through the pages of her website, I felt something within me ignite. It was only an ember, but its presence was both intoxicating and shocking.
Here was a woman encouraging me to pause, to question, to reflect, to slow way, way, way down. To rest. To see my unfulfilled longing for a child as a gift that had turned up to save my life. To see my symptoms as a blazing sign of my innate fertility, rather than the inverse. What was this madness? Everyone else had been telling me my life was tragic and hopeless and that I had to react right now or risk a certain barren future. And the telling had stopped being kind long ago. It was now screaming and scolding. The loudest of these voices was my own.
Long ago, the revelation of a family secret shattered the entire framework of my life. At age 35, stability was once again ripped away when I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and forced to focus exclusively on surviving and healing. Reading Julia’s words, I felt the ground beneath me give way again. But this time, it wasn’t crushing, it was freeing. I was being called to look at my fertility struggles through an entirely different lens. To question everything that I had ever been told or read or believed.
“In Julia’s words, I would need to become my own fiercest ally and ignite a trust in the wisdom of my body. “
In Julia’s words, I would need to become my own fiercest ally and ignite a trust in the wisdom of my body. What was the wisdom within its rebellion to conceive what my partner and I so dearly longed for? Was I willing to sit patiently with the most tender parts of myself to really hear the answer?
The gut punching question, “what will this baby bring you that you don’t already have?” forced me to confront all that I was neglecting in every other domain of my life, from the banal to the sacred. It was overwhelming to begin with.I was an old hand at intense psychotherapy and naively thought I’d already gone to the deep, but Julia and the Fertile Heart practice gently asked me to go further.
“I started to hear my own wisdom and started making choices that felt aligned with my own truth “
And so further I went. I read her books, I joined her Visionary Circles, I did her imagery and body truth exercises. I examined my food, my thoughts, my job, my relationships, my creativity, my spirituality, my intuition, my choice of doctors and other clinicians, my motivation in everything. And things started to shift. The noose loosened. The breath returned. I started to hear my own wisdom and started making choices that felt aligned with my own truth, rather than what someone else had decreed was my path.
I say the above in the past tense, as though that’s where this journey resides. But it’s not in the past. It’s very much alive for me in the present, for I have not yet seen the “completion” of my longing in the sense of the birth of a child. To say that’s the point of the Fertile Heart practice is to diminish its gift.
Yes, my partner and I are still walking toward a child together, but I’m also walking for myself. Walking towards the me that can’t be born any other way than through this fertility challenge. And as with any birth, gestation and labor can’t be sidestepped.
I am my own midwife to my own birth. But I’m beautifully and extraordinarily supported by Julia and the Fertile Heart practice. Julia sensitively balances deep presence and compassion with an honesty that’s surgically precise. Space is created to honour and hear parts long silenced, but not indulgence to stay wedded to them. Rather, a focus on spiralling upwards to craft a new narrative and new actions rather than cycling through the same pattern of victimhood.
For so long I had wanted someone to excise my longing for a child. To cleave it from my soul so I could find a way to safely exist in the world as a fully present being, rather than the bereft automaton I felt I had become. Through the Fertile Heart work, I have embraced that which I previously thought radical. I have fallen in love with my longing. As with any love affair, there are moments of doubt and struggle but above all, there is the visceral knowing that this love is enduring and affirming. This love is mine.
