Coping with Mother’s Day when you’re TTC or having IVF

Mother's Day, 2015. Or maybe 2016. The years from that time have a way of blurring together. It was the middle of what I call my miscarriage era, which sounds flippant and isn't meant to be, it was just a really shitty time and lightening it up is how I cope.

I was sitting in a restaurant with my family and the waiter came round with champagne for every mother at the table. I took mine and said nothing, because I didn't feel entitled to it or even sure whether I counted, but I also didn't want to explain. I held the glass carefully in my shaky hands and kept my mouth shut.

He didn't ask though, the waiter, he just poured. No proof required, no category to fit into, no quiet assessment of whether I deserved to be included. I was a woman at a table on Mother's Day and that was enough for him. Sitting there, grief filling my tummy, holding in the losses nobody in that room knew about, being handed something celebratory with no questions asked, made me feel, just for a moment, like I was included in something I wasn't sure I belonged to.

I've thought about that more than you'd expect from a free glass of fizz.

Before I struggled to have a baby I didn’t give Mother’s Day a lot of thought. Everyone around you seems to know exactly what the day is for and who it belongs to, but when you're in the middle of IVF treatment, fertility challenges or loss you're not sure where you fit. You're desperately hoping to be a mother so you don’t want to refuse to celebrate the Hallmark Holiday. You might already feel like a mother, in every way that matters to you, even without a child to show for it. But the day doesn't seem to have a category for that ambiguity, which adds to the pain.

There's the social side to manage of course, the brunches and lunch and posts and flowers and assumptions. There's the physical side if you're mid-cycle, monitoring your hormones, counting the follicles, waiting, so much waiting. And there's the emotional side, which is a strange combination of grief and hope and longing that's really hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it. You're mourning something you haven't lost yet, or that you've lost too many times, while holding on to the possibility that this time might be different. It’s exhausting.

So if you're finding today hard, whether you're mid-IVF, recovering from a loss, or somewhere in that complicated in-between, you don't have to perform your way through it. You're allowed to find it crappy. You're allowed to opt out of the brunch or the family lunch or the WhatsApp thread that's making it hard to breathe. Coping with Mother's Day during fertility treatment or miscarriage isn't about finding a way to make it fine, it's about giving yourself permission to feel whatever comes up without judging yourself for it.

And if someone hands you a glass of champagne today, you take it, knock it back and know that you count this Mother's Day.

If you're struggling to juggle fertility treatment with the demands of work, finding it hard to separate the two, or just trying to get through the next day, week, month, that's exactly where I come in. You don't have to keep putting on the 'I can do anything' front. Find out more about working with me or come and join the Collective.