Well, hello.
I seem to have started 2024 with a flurry of new subscribers – perhaps you found me via
- which is wonderful, of course, and very much the point of writing a newsletter: the people who want to read it. However, I’ll admit to feeling something akin to digital stage fright, as a result.This is a version of something I originally wrote in January 2023 – with a bit of an update for long-term readers. Amid all the usual new year go-getting and goal-setting, I hope it contains some things that bear repeating. And that it brings a little comfort if the turning of the year is tinged with sadness and ‘what ifs’ for you, as it is for me.
I’ll be back in your inboxes next week, with a post about how trying to conceive permanently altered my relationship with alcohol.
For several years in a row, as January unfurled in its usual grey way, I put ‘have a baby’ right at the top of my list of goals for that year.
By 2018, after three miscarriages, and awaiting various test results, the goal had been revised to ‘have a baby, or at least find out what’s wrong with us’. (This is, word for word, what I wrote down).
By 2019, as Dan and I once again discussed what we hoped and wanted out of the coming year, and the obvious matter of a baby came up, once again, I said: ‘Yes, but I don’t think we should put it on the list.’
My reasoning was it was just too much pressure. Because it was not something that was ultimately within our power to control. Because it was no longer something we could simply try harder to achieve. We had tried so hard already.
A baby, it turns out, is not a new year’s resolution you can keep with willpower alone.
And I didn’t need yet another reminder, when I looked back over the list in 12 months time, that it had, once again, not happened for us.
Now listen, you can obviously put whatever you want on your own list of things you want to accomplish this year. Sometimes, when you’re deep in the cycle of trying to conceive, blinkered positivity is all there is to go on.
But can I tentatively – gently, kindly – suggest that you pause and consider whether ‘have a baby’ should really be considered a ‘goal’ at all?
For my book, I interviewed the anthropologist Dr Susie Kilshaw, who spoke to me about how, in Western societies, fertility has become ‘a kind of neo-liberal responsibility’. We’ve come to see it as our job to manage it, control it, optimise it.
But should we? When the field of what we don’t know about pregnancy, miscarriage, and stillbirth is still so wide, approaching conception like any other self-improvement project feels to me like setting yourself up for recrimination and (more) disappointment.
Look, I am – as I hope you know if you’ve been reading here for a while – far from the ‘everything happens for a reason’ girl. I resolutely do not believe we should treat fertility as some big, magical mystery that we mere mortals can never hope to master. We are owed far better answers about our bodies than we currently get.
But until those answers are forthcoming, until we do know more, is it fair to treat it as a goal that can and must be worked at?
More to the point, how can we truly be reassured that infertility or pregnancy loss is not our fault, when, as a culture, we still act in the exact opposite way when it comes to achieving pregnancy?
You cannot coach yourself into getting pregnant more easily. Fertility cannot be neatly habit-stacked or solved with the right morning routine.
This isn’t to say there aren’t things to do or ways to help yourself through, if what you want – more than anything – is a baby. Or that you shouldn’t let trying for a baby be where you direct a significant amount of your energy this year (because, truly, it can take a lot of energy and headspace – far more than many lucky people realise).
Only, I do think the focus needs to be subtly different.
By all means, make plans and aims to support yourself as you try to conceive. But only write down ‘goals’ for yourself that you can actually control the outcome of. Focus on the ways you want to feel this year, with or without a pregnancy or a child (or, indeed, another child). That might mean doing less in other areas of your life, to give yourself more coping room – or it might mean deliberately directing your energy into those other areas; not postponing and prevaricating according to a hypothetical pregnancy.
I also think it means trying to resolve to do things that will enrich your life whatever happens, rather than leave you dispirited, thinking ‘well, that was a waste of time’ come January 1st 2025. (I’m thinking of painfully restrictive ‘fertility’ diets, or giving up things that otherwise bring you pleasure for the sake of pregnancy optimisation.)
Although I did eventually have a baby, I never did keep that 2018 resolution to ‘find out what was wrong with us’.
It’s an unanswered question that’s still asking things of me in 2024. It is no less relevant because I stopped writing it down. It still matters to me, even as I nudge towards accepting that I may never know.
But I am glad I stopped writing it down.
Last year – 2023 – I couldn’t see beyond February, when my book was published. I didn’t dare ask for more of a single year than that. I didn’t expect that 2023 – three years on from having my son – would also be the year I felt ready to contemplate another pregnancy.
By which I really mean I finally felt resilient enough to cope with the possibility of another loss.
And, of course, by the end of the year, another miscarriage down, that resilience had ebbed away again. I’m still waiting, uncertain if it will ever come back.
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
I do know, however, that I cannot chase it down. I cannot will myself to be more resilient, just as I cannot resolve to be more fertile; to stay pregnant next time. None of us can.
And contrary to the gospel of self-development – all those January preachers, selling certainty and hard-work-gets-results – just because you didn’t write it down and performance-manage it to within an inch of your sanity, doesn’t mean you didn’t really, really want it.
Wise and beautiful xx
Yes to this! “You cannot coach yourself into getting pregnant more easily. Fertility cannot be neatly habit-stacked or solved with the right morning routine.” I’ve been project managing my fertility for 5 years now and it wasn’t until 2023 when I decided to expand my life and do things that weren’t for fertility - joining a choir, binning the diets, etc. It has been a relief! x