This essay features discussion of pregnancy loss and miscarriage; please take care.

Lil O’Brien (she/her) is an internationally award-winning copywriter (as Lil Cameron), and in 2020 published the memoir Not that I’d Kiss a Girl. This essay is an extract from the new book, Otherhood: Essays on being childless, childfree and child adjacent.‍

When she heard why I was visiting New York, she responded via email, ‘Oh gosh, well it is SUCH a fertile apartment.’ I was subletting her place for a couple of weeks. ‘You know the fish that you’re feeding?’

I’d looked at the tank, gurgling away on the bedroom dresser. There were about 40 tiny translucent fish in it, each one shot through with electric red.

‘Well, when we bought the fish there were only THREE of them! Everyone who stays in the apartment will spawn! Ha-ha.’

I was on day seven of the nine-day wait between an IVF cycle’s embryo transfer and the day I could test to see if I was pregnant. What a bitch those nine days are. You’re exhausted. You veer between positivity and berating yourself for daring to hope. You’re probably also broke, you’d quite like a large glass of wine or maybe half a bottle, and then on top of everything else, they say: no masturbation allowed. Please, no orgasms — lest you dislodge the blastocyst trying to burrow its way into your uterine lining. And so you wait. To find out if you’re pregnant, but also until you can get yourself off again. Not that you feel like getting yourself off, but you want to be allowed to. There are many cruelties on the treacherous road that is IVF, but this is the one that felt like a real ‘fuck you’. It reeks of the patriarchy. I don’t know how that’s to blame, but somehow it must be.

•

A couple of days later another email arrived from the well-meaning woman while I was lying on her bed, wiping tears into her bedding. The embryo transfer had failed.

‘I forgot to tell you, more evidence of the fertile apartment,’ the woman’s follow-up email read. ‘Our son was both conceived and given birth to in that very bed! So you’ll definitely have success this time, I can just feel it!’

We were now down to our last embryo, which my wife and I had left here in New York on ice when we moved back to New Zealand. We’d had two years of fertility treatments, getting pregnant, losing the pregnancies — the last one had a particularly brutal ending that left me bleeding and leaking breast milk for weeks afterwards. 

People don’t talk about how when you lose a pregnancy after a certain number of weeks, there’s no procedure to remove the tissue. You have to go through all the pain and trauma of delivering, knowing that a baby won’t be placed into your arms at the end. The doctor who’d tried to save the foetus had done an operation that no one in New Zealand had ever done before, including her. What had gone wrong in my pregnancy was so rare that most doctors have never heard of it: a form of TRAP sequence. When we were told the operation to try to fix the problem had failed and there was subsequently no longer a heartbeat, my grief was overshadowed by the terror of having to go through a birthing process, although you probably can’t call it that.

•

I was desperately homesick that last time in New York, but not for my home in New Zealand or even for my wife, who hadn’t been able to join me due to the financial costs. I was homesick for the New York I used to love; the one that made me feel like I’d found my place in the world, and all the other gushing clichés the city provokes. That feeling was being wiped out by the grind of this trip, which would now be a month longer than we’d hoped, because I had to wait for my body to pull itself back together for one last attempt.

It also meant I had to find accommodation to cover that extra time, on a limited budget. That long wait in New York would include two nights in a hoarder’s apartment hidden behind a respectable brownstone front, where the pillows on the bed made me sneeze and where I slept fitfully, watched by the eyes of more than a hundred stuffed toys.

I’ve always been good at actively managing my happiness, believing you can build on your resting happiness level by doing things you enjoy every day, and consciously appreciating them. And so, during those long weeks in New York while waiting to do the final embryo transfer, I’d tried doing the things that used to make me happy when I lived in that crazy place: sickly sweet iced chai lattes from Black Star on Metropolitan Ave, walking through Union Square to author talks at Strand Books, live storytelling events at Housing Works in Soho, or just walking around, waiting for things to happen. 

During our first week in New York in 2015, my wife and I were walking to brunch when we saw a collection of people coming out of a church near our new apartment.

‘Look how beautiful that woman looks in her Sunday best,’ I’d said.

‘Errrr.’

My wife’s mouth was hanging open, and there was the woman with her pink frilly dress hoisted around her waist, pissing right there on the pavement.That’s the brilliant thing about New York. You don’t need to be doing anything interesting when you live there. Interesting things just happen to you.

But on that trip, trying to get pregnant again, I was miserable, despite my efforts towards mindfulness. Perhaps it was all the fertility drugs my clinic had prescribed me. I was on a double dose of progesterone because the pills they’d given me at Fertility Associates in Auckland hadn’t raised my levels enough. When I’d made it to New York the doctor had tutted and prescribed the injectable progesterone I was supposed to be on — which wasn’t available in New Zealand — on top of the pills. Every morning I managed breakfast, a shower and an injection in the soft flesh of my hip before I crashed into unconsciousness, finally surfacing from a dreamless, black sleep around noon.

•

Buying sperm in the US is much like searching for an apartment online. You create an account on the website and add your credit card. You input your filters to see a tailored selection of results, then read the short blurbs to see if you want to click into the listing to learn more. It’s just that instead of number of bedrooms or bathrooms, you’re selecting hair colour, ethnicity, education level, religion, height — or even who the donor’s lookalikes are, just in case you’re looking for a donor who bears a similarity to Jake Gyllenhaal (the one man I would consider sleeping with). Actually, this is a silly analogy. There are far more filters on California Cryobank than on Trade Me, or Apartments.com. 

Eighteen, in fact. So, perhaps it’s actually more like Airbnb? But without the pretty pictures. You have to pay to see the pictures.

•

As a lesbian couple, deciding to have a baby is the first step in a journey of research, organisation and, often, money. Romance? Pah. Sex? Not relevant. It’s a list of decisions. Who will carry the baby? How will you get sperm? Will you ask someone you know, or join the list of queers and unlucky straights suffering through the long wait for sperm at Fertility Associates?

Most queer mums I’ve known have pretty firm ideas about whether they want to use a known donor or an anonymous one. For my wife and me, it was very firmly the latter. I personally wanted to cede the smallest possible part of creating this child to a man. There was no dad in this equation, just as there was no man in my relationship. In fact, if the technology where scientists can grow sperm from your female partner’s stem cells was further along and available, I would have been first in line. For me, there is a small grief baked into having a baby as a same-sex couple. Creating a person out of biological input from both of you just isn’t available to most of us. I wished that my child could inherit my wife’s creativity, or her broad shoulders. I wished that we could put their baby photos side by side and laugh about how they had the same squishy nose. And I wish more people understood that being able to produce a child between you and your partner, with no interventions, is a privilege, not a given.

Trying for a baby while we were in America was a no-brainer because of the opportunities living in the States gave us. Most of that is to do with the fact that with credit card in hand we could have sperm in the space of two minutes, rather than two years or more, which is what the wait for sperm can be when you’re going through Fertility Associates, one of the few clinical sources of sperm in New Zealand. More than two years, and then you may be given as few as three or four options to choose from, due to the ongoing sperm shortage. 

‘Ninety per cent of them being an absolute “no”,’ says my friend who has had an adorable son through Fertility Associates. A fairly important consideration for me was also the population size of New Zealand. Now, I’m no statistician, but surely our choice of sperm donor would have also been used by at least one if not a number of the lesbians we know. I didn’t want any part in that situation if I could help it.

Couples learn a lot about each other when they’re travelling, when they see each other in their work environments and, it turns out, also when trying to select a sperm donor from about 250 options. My approach was to painstakingly comb through the profiles, making a shortlist, adding notes about what I found appealing based on a single photograph of each dude as a baby — as well as their profile, personal essay or staff impressions. However, when my wife looked at my shortlist, she was like, ‘Meh’.

And then I was like, ‘OK. Yeah. I guess I’m meh, too.’

How do you choose such a huge thing with so little information? But then again, is it really that important? Because you never know how the kid is going to come out — they could end up being someone who tortures small animals for fun, no matter what you do.

We decided to pay US$145 to reach Level 2 on the Cryobank website. This would give us access to a few more photos for each person, including possibly an adult photo depending on what the donor had uploaded. There can be quite a gulf between what people look like as a toddler (cute as shit) and an adult (Republican-looking motherfucker), so a few more photos was quite an appealing option. It also gave us access to something called Express Yourself, with an icon of a paintbrush and a musical note. People’s expressing of themselves subsequently cancelled out about 80% of my shortlist, so I guess that was money well spent. Paying for Level 2 also gives you access to a ‘Donor Keepsake: when you tell us you are pregnant’, which gave me terrifying thoughts of a lock of hair turning up in our letterbox one day.

Still none of the options jumped out at us, so my wife decided she’d have a go at looking, and in her typical way of bettering me with little effort (the few things I could beat her at included speed-walking and that game where you try to hit a tennis ball tied to a pole with string), she came up with a great option within minutes.

The main thing I remember about the donor we chose is that he looked a little bit like Prince William at 12-years-old, when he was toothy in an adorable way. The donor was also tall, six-foot plus, which is a requirement I see come up for straight women again and again on reality TV shows such as Indian Matchmaker and Love Island. (But like, maybe you should worry about whether he’s a toxic, gaslighting misogynist, rather than how tall he is?)

Our height preference came from the fact that my wife was tall, and she already felt like a giant whenever she was around the rest of my family, who all hover around five feet three to five feet six. She wanted to have at least the chance of a tall child, so that she and they could be connected physically in some way.

The donor we chose was also a rocket scientist. This would obviously be a great story to tell at parties when I was pregnant. We had our donor, and forked out US$5225 to get five vials of sperm.

•

As a lesbian couple, deciding to have a baby is the first step in a journey of research, organisation and, often, money. Romance? Pah. Sex? Not relevant. It’s a list of decisions.

•

Our fertility clinic was on Madison Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, surrounded by shops like Givenchy and Balenciaga in case you felt like pretending to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman after being in stirrups. The first time we went to the clinic, we thought, Are we allowed to be here? Surely they should check if we were in any way famous, or influential, but no, we were rich enough to pay for fertility treatments, and that’s all that seemed to matter. (We achieved this with the help of my wife’s US health insurance — we were very lucky that it had a fertility treatment clause in there, and even more lucky that it allowed us to utilise it as a same-sex couple, which was rare.)

The waiting room was always 90% women with a few men scattered about, including the occasional Hasidic Jewish couple who I noticed would sit as far away from everyone else as possible — the men aren’t allowed to sit next to a woman who isn’t their wife. The dominant number of women at the clinic might seem obvious on first thought. But, given the assumption that most people accessing fertility treatments would be coupled up, and most of those couples were opposite sex, why were there so few men? 

Here’s a list of some of the reasons why you might be at the clinic: initial consultation, men jacking off for various reasons, IUI insemination, blood tests, meetings to discuss results, ultrasounds to see how your ovaries are responding to fertility drugs, ultrasounds to check in on a foetus’ progress and so on. Now, how many of those do you need the man to be there for?

As I type this, I’m imagining a white American man. He’s dressed head to toe in Nike, and he wants to get in five miles on the Peloton before work, but his wife needs to go to the fertility clinic to get her weekly blood test, or maybe to discuss the results of her test to see if her fallopian tubes are blocked.

‘Babe,’ he’d say, drinking his kale smoothie. ‘Do I need to be there for this visit? Like, I am fully here to support you, but this is just a routine appointment, right? You can handle it yourself, can’t you? You’re a big girl.’

I imagine that this man will be there for the ultrasound to see the baby’s heartbeat, though. That’s when he can say, ‘Babe, look what we made.’

•

The guy in charge of getting me pregnant had at one time been voted America’s Top Fertility Doctor, whatever that means. Most successful pregnancies? Best quality babies? It’s unclear. I googled ‘America’s-top-fertility-doctor-reality-tv-show’ as I was writing this essay, certain that the concept would have been capitalised on by now. It hasn’t, but surely it’s only a matter of time. Either way, this doctor had seen a lot of vaginas, and that was comforting, as someone who had only had her first pap smear a year earlier due to being deeply uncomfortable with health professionals putting things ‘up there’. Oh, how quickly you get used to people rummaging around in your vagina when you undergo fertility treatments.

My doctor looked scarily like Dr Spaceman from 30 Rock, so I’ll call him that. Dr Spaceman had also been named a New York ‘Super Doctor’, and despite the marketing aligning fertility doctors with superheroes he was a low-key dude.

Dr Spaceman reckoned my egg count was looking good and we were definitely going to help him keep his spot as America’s Top Fertility Doctor. I should have no problem getting pregnant through intrauterine insemination (IUI), aka ‘the turkey baster method’, which is a lot less involved than in vitro fertilisation (IVF). But this being America they threw a whole bunch of drugs at me anyway. Things to make my ovaries glisten with preparedness and the lining of my womb grow thick and welcoming. It took a few goes and more than a few thousand US dollars, but once Dr Spaceman realised one of my fallopian tubes was blocked and squirted the sperm towards the other one, I got pregnant pretty fast.

•

An early-stage miscarriage is something that happens to so many pregnant people, but has different effects on everyone. For me, when we were told there was no longer a heartbeat at the 12-week scan, my initial reaction of sadness was replaced by reasoning: Of course this happened. You were so fucking naive to think it would be this easy. In fact, thinking ‘Wow, that was not too difficult after all’ is probably what made the pregnancy fail!

But I’m someone who’s pretty good at compartmentalising, and I soon brushed off that setback. It was just part of the process, I saw now, and I adjusted my expectations. I began a single-minded, pig-headed pursuit towards ‘success’. That’s how I cope with bad shit in general: I just keep going, sometimes at a maniacal pace. When you’re still going, you can focus on the plan and the practicalities — and not the feelings. The things you do have control over, when so much of trying to have a baby is out of your control.

My wife, on the other hand, seemed devastated, and she’s not like me — she didn’t shake things off (and then write an essay about it for closure five years later). By the time I was eventually pregnant again, she couldn’t bring herself to touch my growing bump. I felt like she didn’t dare to believe that this one would work; to become too attached.

When we started IVF, I was fairly confident. I wasn’t infertile, after all. It was simply a matter of logistics. By then, a year or so had passed and we only had one of the rocket scientist’s vials of sperm left after four rounds of IUI, with no more available. On top of that, we had to leave the country soon. IVF was our best chance at making another pregnancy happen, and we could potentially get multiple embryos from one shot of white gold. If we didn’t have success during the time we had left in the States, it could mean having embryos to come back to.

It’s hard to articulate how the pressure started ramping up at that point.

I remember being wheeled into the recovery room after my egg retrieval and hearing another woman arrive not long after as I was lying in a hospital bed behind a privacy curtain.

‘How many eggs did you get?’ she’d asked the nurse.

‘The doctor was able to collect three viable eggs,’ I’d heard the nurse reply gently.

‘Is that good?’

I could hear the hopeful tremor in the woman’s voice, but my heart had sunk for her. In comparison, they’d gotten 23 of my eggs. From there, 19 survived to be fertilised, and 15 were successfully fertilised. And from those, we ended up with five surviving ‘Day 5’ blastocysts, which is when they’re frozen. Given the way those numbers dropped, what were her chances? It’s such a cruel game of luck, the trying to have a child thing, with very clear winners and losers.

•

The best part about undergoing fertility treatments in New York, after the access to sperm, was being treated equally to straight couples. As a queer person I go into many new settings with my guard slightly up, particularly medical ones, where heteronormativity is rife. I’m waiting to see if I’ll be treated differently, or if there will be that tiny pause people make when they click that I’m not straight. But we were able to very quickly relax in New York. There was not one millisecond of awkwardness, or incorrect pronouns or assumptions. Perhaps that’s partly why our experience with a Sydney fertility clinic was so shocking.

It was about nine months after our final embryo transfer had failed, and we’d given up on our American fertility dream. We were back to square one, no sperm, no embryos, nothing. When I started making enquiries into sperm access and how the system worked in Australia, the fertility clinic told us that the first thing we had to do was meet with a counsellor. This in itself is pretty fucked — that people who need help getting pregnant have to prove themselves fit in some way, whereas people who can get pregnant with the old P in V can do what they want (as they should).

But when you’ve been through fertility treatment you’re used to bending yourself into knots to reach your goal, and so we went into the session without too much thought. Just tired resignation. What could this therapist possibly say that we hadn’t thought of before?

What she said, near the end of the session, was: ‘Have you got many straight friends?’

My wife and I glanced at each other, both thinking, Is she saying what we think she’s saying?

‘Um, yeah, we have straight friends.’

‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘It’s important for a child to be exposed to a diverse range of people.’

I don’t remember how we managed to get through the rest of the session, but I know that we were too shocked to say anything and I remember the feeling it gave me, because I have it now even just writing about it. My breathing is shallow and my skin feels too tight around my ribcage. I wish I could go back to that moment and let rip on her. There’s so much I want to say to her, like how even if we kept our child locked in our gay-ass house for their whole life, or only ever exposed them to our queer friends, they would still have heterosexuality in their face nearly every day. Heteronormativity would still do its sinister ideological work, and that is far more influential than whether we had straight friends or not. I want to know if she asks straight couples if they have gay friends.

We didn’t go any further with the clinic. And when six months after that my wife and I separated amicably, for a variety of complicated reasons, something strange happened. I didn’t want it anymore. All that drive and desire and stubbornness just drained out of me.

At first I didn’t believe it, and I kept testing myself. With every mum I drove past on the street pulling a toddler behind her, or parent shushing a baby to sleep in a pram, I measured how I felt against that scenario, putting myself in their shoes, and the overwhelming feeling was: yuck. I realised just how much of wanting a child was about wanting to have one with my wife specifically — when I imagined having a child it was about the family we would build together, not so much about having one itself. 

And so, I just . . . let it go, and I felt a strange but welcome relief. Because by letting go of the idea of having a baby it felt like I was also stepping outside of a system of oppression. The people who can birth children are tied to a timeline of what we must do and when we must do it, all centred around when we are fertile. When you take that consideration away, life opens up. You can do what you like, whenever.

I didn’t realise how much I had felt the societal pressure to have children until I chucked the ticking biological clock in the bin — I’d honestly thought that I was outside of that pressure because I was queer. After all, people didn’t ask me when I was going to have kids the way they did with my straight friends.

•

It’s been about five years since I stopped trying to have children, but I have ended up with them in my life, including my partner’s teenage kids. They joke that my partner and I are just roommates, who share a bed because we can only afford one. They also call me ‘bonus mom’, which feels nice.

I feel so lucky to be queer; part of a community that I believe has a healthier, less stifling concept of what family is, beyond who you’re born to — or who is born to you. My family is those I’ve found, and those who’ve found me, and it’s a joy to think that there’s more family out there I just haven’t met yet.

• This essay is an extract from Otherhood: Essays on being childless, childfree and child adjacent edited by Alie Benge, Lil O’Brien and Kathryn Van Beek. Published by Massey University Press, $40

The book’s editors will appear, along with some contributors, at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday May 19. Details and tickets, here.