In Vitro Fertility Goddess.
I was on the fertility wagon once, not for very long because I bought the wrong ticket. Still I was there and I remember it well. I even have a child to prove it. Admittedly I was given a leg-up, meaning I used assisted reproductive technology, but for nine glorious months I got to enjoy the world from a different perspective.
It was the perspective that fertility goddesses see the world from: the ‘I can reproduce, I can bear children, nah, nah, nah' one. And I enjoyed it, I really did. I started to settle in, feel right at home, even started to think about redecorating, when it happened.
I fell off the wagon. This time it took me by surprise as I'd really believed I'd conquered my infertility, that if I'd been there that long I could stay. Pregnant again through natural causes after my IVF child, I was on the cusp of becoming a fertility goddess. Until I miscarried at seven and a half weeks and from there everything went into decline.
I tried Frozen Embryo transfer to no avail and failed two IVF drug tests. The brief glory days of having a successful pregnancy had passed. I was shattered, beyond hope.
By now I was forty-one and a half and didn't have the energy to pursue getting back on the wagon again. And now that I've had a full hysterectomy I'll have to find another way to get around. I'm thinking the Menopausal Motorbike, part of the latest trend in HRT or Hormone Replacement Transport.
But I digress, easy to do when your body is the temperature of a charcoal brazier.
What is the point of this story? It is that fertility isn't an absolute or a given. You can't buy it, trade it or get rid of it. It can be yours and then you can lose it, or you can think you haven't got it and in the brief but painful jab of a trigger injection you find it.
It can be fleeting, or it can be permanent like cellulite or having a Bush in politics. And if you can't be a real fertility goddess, you can fake it. Just look at Hollywood, the world capital of Botox, plastic surgery and Assisted Reproduction. And of course, falling off the wagon.
Jodi Panayotov author of In Vitro Fertility Goddess »
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