This blog is about my journey to have a child, well initially about my egg freezing journey but now as I move beyond that its about using these eggs to have a child.  This being the case, I have tried to avoid using it as a place to share relationship ups and downs that I have had with men who have come in and out of my life over the past few years during this process, but this post is going to be slightly different.  It touches on the topic of dating through this journey.  Dating for me is hard enough as it is but add in the topic of egg freezing and donor sperm, particularly in a country (the UAE) where these aren’t ‘talked about’ topics, and it makes dating all the more difficult.

I’ve read a lot about people trying to juggle dating while trying to freeze their eggs and I think its definitely possible to do, in fact I have dated some great guys over the past few years and each of them i have told (early on) about my desire to have a child and how I have frozen my eggs to try and preserve my chances.  Its not an easy thing for a women in her late 30s/early 40s to bring up in the early days of dating particularly in a country where these things aren’t openly talked about, and it seems to be the looming question that gets asked really early on ‘do you have kids?’ ‘do you want kids’.  I think men assume that if you don’t have any by early 40s then you never wanted them or they think ‘oh shit….. she is going to want to settle down tomorrow and get pregnant’ and then that scares them off.

A good guy friend once told me (which was great advice) ‘get the fact that you have frozen your eggs out there early when you start dating someone new, it will take the pressure off those awkward questions and allow you both to relax a little…. trust me a guy will feel relieved.   So, I made the conscious decision early on to talk about the fact that I wanted kids but in the same breath also disclose that I had frozen my eggs to preserve my chances and be non apologetic for this fact, despite where I lived.  I figured if they ‘ghosted me’ after hearing this then they weren’t the guy for me anyway.

The challenge I had was that I met someone who already had kids, didn’t want any more of his own but was very supportive of my journey to use donor sperm to have a child… let me take you back.

Totally unexpectedly, just after I had come to the decision that I was ready to do this alone I walked into a bar one evening in Dubai to meet a guy that I have to say I had no intention of becoming attached to.  Why on earth would I get myself attached to someone when in a few months I would be trying to get pregnant with a donor sperm and have a child… you can’t date someone whilst pregnant with another mans child…. can you? Meeting someone now would be a stupid idea… right??? Well I never said I always made the best decisions, especially when it comes to my heart! But I had a plan and i might be dating him, but I wasn’t going to get attached!

I think at first the fact I wanted nothing from him was what attracted me to him the most.  He had just come out of a long term relationship and so wasn’t looking for anything either, so we were both carefree and just enjoyed each others company.  We talked about my journey to becoming a mum and he talked about challenges he had with being away from his young daughter.  He made it clear that I wasn’t ‘his type’ and I made it clear that I had a plan and no one was going to mess with it.  So to say ‘it was ‘complicated’ was how we defined us as i think we both knew it would never work… This ultimately was probably the reason why I started to want it to!

The odds were against us but what if we just took one day at a time and waited to see what happened.  I knew I wasn’t going to be in the UAE past March, either because I was pregnant or because my work was taking me oversees for a few months, so we just went with the flow and had the best few months I can remember having with someone for a very long time. Not only was he very attractive, he inspired me on an intellectual level and made me laugh.  We were happy together.

I think we both buried our heads in the sand a little as to what actually was going to happen when I hopefully got pregnant…. how was that going to work?  I couldn’t live in the UAE being single and pregnant and he definitely wasn’t ready to marry me, which I would never have wanted him to do for that reason anyway.  I also didn’t want to think about being pregnant in case it didn’t happen, so it was easier to just bury our heads in the sand and enjoy the precious time we had together…… until….we didn’t.

I wish I hadn’t gotten attached as I think deep down I always knew it was going to end in heartbreak.  I was living in this dream world where my knight would ride in at the 11th hour and I would get my ‘happily ever after’… who was I kidding…. not to mention that that is an awful lot of pressure to put on someone who has just come out of a very complicated long term relationship with a child involved.

Moving my eggs from the UK to Cyprus, where i had decided to have treatment for the next step of my journey and where my donor sperm was, took a really long time!  I started the process in January and it was only June that they actually got to their new home.  There was heaps of paperwork and approvals required and co-ordination between clinics and the courier company all across three timezones. It was a process that took a lot longer than I had ever anticipated.  Because the process was dragging on I decided to take the overseas work assignment that I was given from May to August and keep money coming in while I had the luxury of being able to work.  I recall one night mid June having a conference call with the doctor from my clinic in Cyprus to talk about the start of my treatment, during this time I had also decided to buy an apartment in Dubai that I could rent out when I had to leave and would give me something to come back to hopefully one day.  I was juggling late nights at work as my work project ramped up, i was trying to buy a house across timezones and I was discussing with this doctor when I was going to start the process to have a baby.  I do like to keep busy but this was another level!

I said to myself, I’ll finish this work project, head back to the UAE and give myself a month to get settled in the new home and then the next step of the process shall begin.  I got all the prescriptions I needed (had to get these from three different countries as the UAE didn’t have what the doctor prescribed) and moved into my new home and started to prepare myself……. and then the bomb shell hit!

I could tell he started to pull back a little when I told him in March that I likely wouldn’t have put the process off as long as I had if I hadn’t met him…. not meaning this to be any kind of pressure but in hindsight I can see why this ‘overshare’ could have been a trigger for him to pull back.  There was also the moment when he asked why I had never asked him for his sperm, I am not sure if he was offended that I hadn’t or was worried that I might but I was totally honest with him and told that I knew he didn’t want to have any more kids and that it had actually never even crossed my mind to consider him as my sperm donor.  I didn’t want to complicate our situation any more than it already was and I was good with my decision to hopefully conceive using a sperm donor.

Over the summer while I was oversees on my work assignment he visited me which was unexpected.  I had thought him starting to pull back was a sign that things were going to run their course and that what was really inevitable from even the night we first met (that we weren’t going to have a future together), was about to happen, but I think his visit to see me 17 hours away gave me hope that maybe he was in this thing with me.

I returned to the UAE mid August, he was away at this time but I eagerly awaited his return and was excited at what the future held for me and for us, we had talked about him moving into this apartment I had purchased and that when it was time for me to hopefully leave the UAE he would likely rent it from me.

It was a week before his return that I received a text message from him which broke my heart. It said something along the lines of…. ‘I can’t wait to see you and the apartment, but I think you should know that I have started to get involved with someone else, I hope you don’t hate me’ and then signed ‘I love you and I hope we can be the best of friends’.

What was I to do with that?  A million thoughts went through my mind ranging from… how could he do this to me? how could he do this now? maybe he had done me a favour…. forced me to move on and get on with your journey? maybe he was scared of what our future held? Maybe he wanted to end things before we were forced to deal with our reality or maybe he simply didn’t really love me and wanted to be happy with someone else?

Its still pretty raw if I am being honest and its hard for me to grasp that he didn’t see a future for us, particularly when I think back to the amazing times we spent together and the connection we fought but clearly had.  We didn’t spend masses of time talking about the future, for me that was because my future was so uncertain…. for him, possible because he didn’t see a future with me, I don’t know,  but we did talk about starting businesses together, he told me once that I was the smartest girl he had ever met and one day I’d be one of his CEO’s (quite possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me).

I still don’t really know or understand what happened or why it happened how and when it did, but I definitely felt side swiped.  I probably should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.  They do say ‘love is blind’, or maybe I just didn’t want to see it, I’m not quite sure.   But I’m sitting here today writing this post trying so desperately hard to stay positive and trust that people come in and out of our lives for reasons and at the time we may well not know what these reasons are, but over time these reasons become clear.

And so now I know I need to dig deep, try to mend my heart and rebuild myself to the ‘Super Girl’ he used to tell me I was and who I know I am and believe that he has, infact, done me a favour and that if he is supposed to be part of my life in the future then this will happen and if not then the reason for us meeting will become clear over time.  Its hard to believe this but I know right now this is the only choice that I have.