"LIFE BEGINS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF DESPAIR"
- Jean-Paul Sartre
You never imagined that making a baby would be
THIS! HARD!
You stopped protection, got some supplements and changed bits and pieces in your diet. You planned for a few extra romantic nights and a pregnancy announcement a few months later.
Except, it didn't quite go according to plan.
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The first negative result didn’t bother you much. In the second month, umm, okay, still fine. Third month; panic sets in and as the months without that BigFatPositive pile up, your life turns into a downward spiral of emotions.
Your life is taken over by the only thing you can think about: getting pregnant. You spend days and nights on Google, fill up your kitchen cabinet with 22 more magical supplements and restrict your diet to broccoli, kale and pineapple core. You spend your free hours with needles all over your body and drinking herbal teas that make you want to choke, but you're forcing it down because you don't want to risk not doing everything you've heard can help.
When it's time for 'action', it IS time, no matter whether you are both in the mood or not. The timer is already set for 15 minutes legs up in the air, right after.
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But nothing seems to work. The clock is ticking and you are feeling more and more defeated and broken.
And when someone tells you "just relax and it will happen" you're trying really hard to remain lady-like and stop that middle finger from rising.
You can’t "just relax"! You CAN'T FRIKIN' RELAX AT All!
Hey, I’m Kat. And I see you, I’ve been there too.
I’m a Fertility Mindset Specialist, supporting women who've tried everything to get pregnant but are drowning in the never-ending cycle of hope, worry, and despair. Peeing on a stick is heart-breaking, and the fear of never having a child is consuming their lives.
I help them to take a breather, gain emotional strength and enjoy their life again so they can boost their fertility chances too.
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It's every woman's birth right to become a mother and none deserve the emotional pain that many of us go through to get there. My mission is to transform this undeserved emotional pain so women can still live and enjoy their life even during their difficult fertility journey.
I'm passionate about body-mind connection and I'm also a living testimonial of how miracles can happen when mind supports body.
My story started fairly early on.
I was 16 when the seed was planted that I'd be struggling with infertility. Having a retroverted uterus made every doctor believe that it was going to be hard for me to conceive. And since they believed it, I believed it too.
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10 years and a couple of relationships later - when I even told my partners not to worry, no accidents will happen anyway - even an astrologist told me that I would be unlikely to have any children.
This was painful. Believing to have difficulties to conceive was not the same as believing it would never happen.
While I wasn't ready to have a family yet, I knew that one day I wanted to be a mother and the possibility of it never happening made me feel devastated.
But trying to be positive, I quickly concluded that seeing an astrologist was a stupid idea and I squashed down this message with all its emotions. I tried not to think about my life without children and not to strengthen my already negative belief about my fertility.
I thought I succeeded.
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It never really occurred to me in the following 10 years that my increasingly painful period was signalling something I should take seriously and that the astrologist might have been right.
By the time I was finally ready to start a family, my monthly period was as painful as if my belly was used as a punch bag by Mike Tyson. I couldn't self-medicate and hide my symptoms anymore and ended up in hospital. First I was diagnosed with a severe case of adenomyosis without much chance for natural conception. Then I was also told that I had very low ovarian reserve and due to my mature age, my chances for IVF were very low too. I wasn't expecting it. And, at the age of 36, I wasn't expecting to be called mature either.
Then it hit me:
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The astrologist was right.
It felt like my whole world collapsed. All the blessings in my life seemed to have disappeared and I became obsessed with my infertility.
My bosses had no idea that they paid me for googling “how to improve my fertility” and emailing Hungarian IVF clinics all day long. I was an expat in Dubai for 7 years by then.
I read every advice I could find on improving my fertility but since I was a part-time yoga teacher - beside a full time job in regional finance - and I was already living a healthy life, there was nothing much in any advice that I wasn't following already.
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But thanks to my regular yoga and breathing exercises, I already had an understanding about body and mind connection and my curiosity only grew further when I learnt about my infertility. I knew that my mindset and emotional wellbeing has something to do with how my body was functioning. And I had to admit to myself that as much as I was conscious about the physical health of my body, I neglected my emotional wellbeing.
I decided to change that.
I went on an internal exploration and I dedicated 3 months of complete focus and attention to internal emotional work before embarking on my first round of IVF.
In the process I learned how to care for and love myself just as I would care for and love my baby. In my mind, I had already become a mother.
The first round of IVF was a miracle. While I only had a couple of healthy embryos, I became a mother indeed. My baby girl is a 7 years old big girl now.
I was probably just lucky, you might be thinking. And in all honesty, that’s what I thought too.
What changed this belief was my second round of IVF two years later.
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Which was a massive failure with the emotional rollercoaster running away with me on full speed.
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I went for it without much preparation, thinking it was so easy the first time, nothing could go wrong this time either.
What I didn't consider was that I was very far from the healthy and emotionally balanced me who I’d built up two years ago in preparation for my IVF then.
I was desperate to have a sibling for my daughter. And since my marriage was heading in the wrong direction, I was perhaps also hoping that another baby would save that. (What a noble mistake.)
I was stressed with work, tired with a toddler and totally out of sync with myself in a failing relationship. Not exactly the right place to plan for another baby.
I shouldn't have been surprised that this round of IVF resulted in zero embryos, but I still was.
Heart break, self blame, guilt, anger and resentment were just a few of the emotions that I had to hide from the world. It took a massive effort to smile while I felt painfully sad, every day. I had never felt this lonely, and that was on top of feeling like a gigantic failure.
I hated feeling like this! I didn’t want to feel like this. I didn’t want my emotions to run my life and I also didn’t want to give up on my dream to have a second baby.
If I did it once, I could do it again. So I decided to take back control and build myself up again for the next round of IVF, just like I did 2 years ago.
But first, I had to sit down with myself and figure things out.
I realised that I had new deep-seated fears and negative beliefs that didn’t exist the first time. I was worried about my relationship and potentially becoming a single mum. I was worried about my age - I wasn't a 'mature' 36 year old anymore, I was getting closer to 40. I was worried about my job and how I could manage another IVF round abroad when my bosses already put up with it twice.
And more and more issues came up that I never imagined would play a role in my fertility.
I had to be honest with myself and figure out if I was indeed willing to go for this with all my fears and uncertainties.
And then, there I was, more determined than ever. And I knew that if I wanted it to happen, I couldn't show up as an emotional wreck again.
So I went back to making myself a priority and I cared and loved for myself again like I did a few years ago - this time with a toddler in tow and a few more logistics to consider.
After 3 months of conscious preparation, working on my beliefs and emotions and strengthening my mindset, the second miracle of my life happened.
The result of our next round of IVF exceeded everyone's expectations but especially mine.
The difference between this and the previous failed cycle was tangible, incredible, mind blowing. I had EIGHT good quality embryos after having none last time.
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I knew then, with absolute certainty, that I wasn’t just lucky the first time. The emotional preparation and the mindset work had just demonstrated its power.
And this is when I knew that helping other women to use the power of their mind to navigate through the hard months of infertility, and with that improving their fertility, would be my mission in this life.
But before I could do that, I had some more lessons to learn.
My first embryo transfer ended in a missed-miscarriage. Then the second one too.
I was heartbroken. But I was also equipped to go through it and not to give up hope. I’ve learnt how to process loss and grief and how to move on. I’ve also learnt how to live with anxiety and the fear of another loss when I finally stayed pregnant.
I was 10 weeks pregnant when a then new and shiny blood test (NIPT) resulted in a borderline positive result for a rare, fatal genetic disorder. Living with the fear of loosing this baby as well for almost 2 months, counting the seconds of every minute until more tests and scans proved it to be a misdiagnosis, was probably THE hardest thing I had to live through. It tested me to my core.
It wasn’t until my completely healthy baby boy was born that I could shake off the fear of something terrible to happen.
And guess what. I was still not out of the woods.
My marriage started to break down soon after I gave birth and soon after gave up my job and life in Dubai to move to the UK with my husband. He had to be home and I hoped that it meant good for all of us.
Two months after landing, I was a single mum of a toddler and a brand new baby in a new, foreign country, without a job, without family and friends, starting a horrendous divorce. (No, it had nothing to do with our fertility struggles.)
Why am I telling you all this? Because people were asking how did I survive it all. They thought I was born strong.
I couldn't tell them what I'm telling you now; I survived because my infertility had taught me how to deal with the most difficult emotions and how to handle anything life throws at me. Without that learning, I'd have probably ended up in a mental institution indeed.
Today, I am grateful for ALL these experiences.
They taught me more than any other degree, course or qualification could ever do. But everyone has a different story and I wanted to be equipped to help anyone who struggles with infertility, regardless of their unique set of difficulties. So I’ve retrained and qualified as a Freedom Fertility Formula Specialist and I'm on my way to become a Cognitive Hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner too.
I'm finally following my passion:
Helping women on a difficult natural or assisted fertility journey to take back control over their life and emotions, build a resilient mindset and enjoy their life during the wait. And with all that, improve their fertility chances too.
I absolutely love my work as a Fertility Mindset Mentor, and every day I’m thankful for the opportunities I have to make a tangible difference in my clients' lives. I love seeing the transformations, the light bulb moments and the relaxed shoulders and hopeful smiles.
And my number one favourite is receiving the baby pictures.