This Father's Day, I'm very conscious that there are a lot of people still on their journey, or recognizing that they may have to take a different path to realize those dreams of parenthood.
My wife and I met on Tinder later in life. Trish was 39 and I was 43 and we quickly realized that we wanted to be together and that we both really wanted children. One of the interesting elements of meeting someone when you're older is that you can bypass some of those early stages of a relationship; we decided we should just get on and start a family. While that sounds simple, what we didn't realize then was that the process of having children is not always straightforward.
That first IVF treatment is full of hope and expectation. We had science involved and an expert team and I remember thinking: why wouldn't this work the first time? We then realized, because we were both over 40 by then, that the chances of success were actually quite low. Over the next four or five years we created 18 embryos in total—a huge amount—and went through about nine cycles of IVF. A few times, we took pregnancy tests that actually came out positive—those were amazing moments. But one thing that fertility treatment does is take away that naivety and ability to enjoy the moment, because there's always a note of caution. With one pregnancy, it turned out that two embryos had implanted.
I remember being sat in the park one day, seeing families playing. There were probably around 100 people and I recall thinking: we have such a small chance of becoming the family playing with their children. The park was full, but I was incredibly lonely. It was a staggering moment to take a pregnancy test after that embryo was implanted and see that it was positive. No one on the fertility journey tells you how many pregnancy tests you're going to get through, because you never believe that first one. Five pregnancy tests later, we realized we were actually pregnant.
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