The Pregnancy at 40+ — What the Leaflets Don't Cover

The fertility clinic had excellent leaflets.

I mean this sincerely. They were well-designed, clearly written, and thorough in a way that informed-consent literature often isn't. They covered the statistics, the process, the risks, the timelines. The nurses were kind and precise. The consultant we saw was the kind of doctor who gives you the information and then gives you time to have feelings about the information, which is rarer than it should be.

What the leaflets did not cover was how it feels to be the man in this situation. Not because anyone was deliberately excluding the male experience — it was clearly a place of thoughtful and compassionate practice — but because the male experience in fertility treatment is genuinely secondary in all the ways that matter, and the literature reflects this accurately.

Claire was the patient. I was the support structure.

I want to write about what that is like, because I haven't seen it written about honestly and I found myself in a situation I was unprepared for, not in terms of logistics but in terms of my own interior.

The asymmetry

Here is the specific asymmetry: Claire's body was the site of the treatment. The injections, the monitoring appointments, the egg collection, the transfer, the waiting — all of this was happening to her, in her, through her.

I was present. I drove her to appointments. I sat in waiting rooms reading magazines that were either three years old or about fishing. I held her hand for the bits that required hand-holding. I did the thing that support structures do, which is to be reliably there.

What I was not was medically involved. My contribution to the process was specific, brief, and conducted in a small room with a plastic cup and a copy of a magazine that was definitely not about fishing. Beyond that I was, to put it plainly, a spectator at something that was happening to someone I loved and that I could not control or accelerate or improve.

I underestimated how hard this was.

The waiting

The waiting is where the difficulty lives.

There is a period after an embryo transfer — typically around two weeks — during which you know something may or may not be happening, and you cannot know which, and there is nothing to do but wait and try not to think about it, which is not a strategy that works for human beings.

I am good at absorbing uncertainty in professional contexts. I have been managing software projects for twenty years; uncertainty is the ambient condition. But professional uncertainty responds to effort. You can research, plan, test, iterate. You can do something.

There is nothing to do in the two-week wait. You wait. Claire waited with more grace than I did, which is partly her temperament and partly the fact that having something actually happening in your body gives you a physical orientation that watching from the outside does not.

I became, during the waiting periods, a person who was very focused on work and very bad at sleeping. I did not describe this as anxiety at the time. It was anxiety.

What came out the other side

Ellie. And then Sam. Both of whom arrived after processes that were difficult in different ways and for different lengths of time, and both of whom are now here, in the house, asking for biscuits at unreasonable hours and painting things that are not supposed to be painted.

I am writing this after the outcome. I am aware that not everyone who goes through this process arrives at the outcome we did. I want to say that plainly because the tone of "and then it worked out" is a tone that carries its own weight for the people for whom it did not work out, and they are not people I want to be breezy at.

What I learned from being the support structure — and I think this applies to the fertility process specifically but also to early parenthood generally — is that the secondary role is not an absence of experience. It is its own experience, with its own emotional content, that frequently goes unexamined because it is not the primary narrative.

You are allowed to find it hard when the hard part is not happening to your body. You are allowed to have feelings that are not about your partner's experience. These are not in competition.

The antenatal class

Our first antenatal class was a Tuesday evening at a church hall, eight couples, plastic chairs. I was the oldest person in the room. The leaflets there were also very good.

I have written about that evening in the first post on this blog, so I won't repeat the whole thing here. What I didn't say there, because I was writing about something else, was that I arrived at that church hall having already been through more than any of the other people in the room suspected, and having not talked about most of it with anyone except Claire.

The antenatal class gave us a room full of people in the same ostensible situation. What it didn't give us — what very little gives you — is a space to talk about the road that led there.

This blog is partly that space. The comments are open. If you are on a road that is longer or harder than the leaflets describe, I am glad you're here.