We’ve been talking a lot recently about trying a second round of fertility treatment with our frozen embryos and I’ve been feeling more and more uncomfortable with our decision to keep this to ourselves. Maybe uncomfortable’s not the word….. if you’ve read some of my other blogs you’ll know that I have always been torn about whether to be more open about how we got our baby. I wanted to tell people at the start but after the counselling (which everyone has to do before they make the decision to go for egg donation), we decided that until we could tell our daughter how she came into this world (which we were always definite that we would do), we’d keep the process to ourselves (see earlier blogs). But I’ve always struggled a bit with this decision. After the initial shock of being diagnosed with early menopause and my only option being egg donation, once I was pregnant and we had a healthy baby and the love grew, I was so grateful that I had had another option to carry our baby and give birth to our child. And I became more and more of an advocate for egg donation that it felt a bit disingenuous to not shout it from the rooftops. But it’s also a very personal thing and I still think a taboo subject.

Mr M recently sent me an article from another woman writing about her story. And I just thought why are we not telling people?? I talked it through with him and all the reasons we decided not to tell people in the first place. And actually, we decided that the second time round, maybe it’s a good time to tell people what our process has been. It’s not a shock for us now like it was the first time, when we were trying to deal with the menopause diagnosis, and egg donation option, and now we know what we’re doing. Also, it doesn’t matter how you get your baby. I really want to help break the taboo of egg donation so why hide? Families come in so many different shapes and sizes nowadays, by the time our daughter is old enough to understand, it might be more of the norm, or not a taboo (I hope so anyway). And I’d like to be part of making this amazing gift more of the norm.

So, as we embark on our next round of treatment, we’re ‘coming out’ and it feels great to have decided to talk about it.