Two weeks before discovering I was pregnant, I sat in a fertility clinic, riddled with uncertainty.
This is because by the time my mother was my age, 27, she had become infertile. Diagnosed with a genetic condition known as early onset menopause, she –in ways similar to her own mother, and her mother’s mother before her – had been forced to accept the stark reality of a childless future.
That was, of course, until she fell pregnant with me: a late and staggering discovery, bookended by nights puffing on cigarettes, sipping cheap moscato and cradling her stomach nervously, guiltily. Uncertain as to whether or not she’d ever fall pregnant again, my mother embraced her gestation, only to stop producing ova a few months after I was born. She was 28 years old, menopausal, and nursing a weeping baby who reached sluggishly for her breasts as she grappled with her newfound infertility, her motherhood and the uncertainty that followed. The complexities were tenfold.
Given the prevalence of early onset menopause in my family, I am 36 times more at risk of inheriting a pair of dying ovaries than the average person. This meant that there was always something uncertain, something precarious, about how my adult life would look: or rather, how I was able to imagine it.
Fantasising about a kind of parenthood free from the looming threat of an expiration date, yet alone a parenthood in general, seemed foolish. Irresponsible, even. I had learned to accept the dubiousness of it all. And so, when two salmon-pink lines formed on a home-brand pregnancy test I cautiously peed on a month ago, the entire situation felt off. Unprecedented. Some kind of sick and twisted blessing. I laughed first before weeping as I lay awake in the quiet hours of the morning, holding my belly despairingly.
What it means to be 27 years old now looks different to what it once did. Despite occasionally wearing the same high-waisted jeans my mother sported in the 90s, her life and mine couldn’t be more at odds, especially now amid a long and arduous global pandemic.
I, like many others of my generation, cannot afford to pay rent in today’s climate, yet alone a mortgage and the security it provides. How do I intend on nursing a newborn in a draughty, inner-city rental I can barely pay for due to losing any semblance of a regular income?
Who will help when I am unable to visit, or access the support of my family, who live 65 kilometres away, outside my five kilometre radius?
Heck, everything looks different now to what it once did. Belonging to a generation stunted by environmental and financial ruin means most markers of adulthood are off limits. We remain housebound, drinking cheap wine with our flatmates come curfew, careful not to get ahead of ourselves when it comes to fantasising about what lies ahead. In many ways, we are eternal teenagers: grounded, frustrated and penniless.
An abortion seemed an obvious but distressing choice. A choice I didn’t want to have to make during one of Victoria’s most strenuous lockdowns. The uncertainty I had learned to shoulder when it came to my ability to conceive in the future – what future? – had bled into all facets of my life.
I, alongside many others, lived day-by-day, my existence determined only by uncertainty: looming case numbers, taxing and countless lockdowns, financial instability, horrid scenes of protesters and broken glass, Dan’s grim expression on the television. In many ways, the world itself seemed as risky and fraught as my looming infertility, and I couldn’t possibly let the grape-sized foetus in my womb continue endeavouring to survive when I barely could myself.
Unable to be accompanied by a support person due to Covid-19 restrictions, I entered the clinic alone, able to hide my trepidation and sadness behind my mask. Ironically, there was an ounce of comfort in this: Victoria’s lockdown restrictions meant it was unlikely there would be anti-abortion demonstrators gathered out the front of the clinic, an ugly parade I had been warned about by many.
In Victoria, two kinds of terminations are offered: the medical kind, and the surgical kind. I was early enough in my pregnancy to be able to access the medical abortion, which involved swallowing a handful of pills over a 48-hour period.
The medication is designed to induce a reaction similar to that of a miscarriage, and is lauded for its capacity to afford people the freedom to abort in the comfort of their own home. But home now – in amid another relentless lockdown – is hardly a place of ease, but rather some kind of allocated enclosure, a location each of us are tethered to without an end in sight. I feared bringing trauma, bringing a kind of sad demise, into a place forced to carry the full spectrum of life as it were.
I feared feeling as if I were living in some kind of graveyard, surrounded by yesterday’s mugs, an unclean ashtray, a pair of bloodied underwear and an infinite amount of grief. I feared a lot of things.
The process was more gruelling than I imagined. After six hours of cramping and nausea, of passing blood clots and bile simultaneously, I fell into an exhausted heap. I ate a packet of Nerds, and managed to let out a wearied laugh. I let myself sink into the warm embrace of the person I shared my pregnancy with before calling my mother, then a close friend who underwent an abortion some years ago, then my mother again. “I want nothing more than to pick you up and bring you home,” she implored. I wanted nothing more either.
The loss I feel is giant, but it isn’t a new kind of a loss. It isn’t a loss married exclusively to the image of nappies and formula. It’s a loss that has niggled away at me for 18 months – the loss of my future prospects, the loss of my twenties, the loss of the freedom to fantasise about raucous overseas adventures, or even just being able to drive an hour to my parents’ home, to fall into my mother’s arms.
There’s no way to know how long my fertility will prevail, and I’m unsure what to do with the potential knowledge that this could be my only pregnancy. But I did what I felt I had to, with the tools I was afforded.
In 2021, only one thing is certain: I am looking down the barrel of a world riddled with uncertainty. And, in some strange and sad way, knowing that life was able to grow – however briefly – where I once thought it couldn’t, provided me with a kind of solace. A hopefulness I’ve missed.
