I had made my peace with never becoming a mother, but fate had other plans, writes Ariana Dunne
They say be careful what you wish for, because all your dreams might just come true. But then again, ‘they’ say a lot of things, and boy, have I heard them all down through the years.
‘What’s meant for you won’t pass you by’, ‘It’ll happen when you least expect it’, ‘When you know, you know.’
I never really believed nor understood any of them. They were, to me, a single, childfree, 30-40 year old woman, just well-meaning platitudes or unwelcome clichés.
I had spent most of my thirties single. Despite my efforts, I just hadn’t met anyone to start a relationship with. I was on every dating app, got set up by exasperated friends, I even had a dating blog and magazine column writing about my ‘hilarious’ but also woeful dating exploits. And still, the one, eluded me. Which is why at 38, when Covid hit and my dating life and meeting anyone beyond a 5km radius became, quite literally, illegal, my poor little biological clock began booming loudly amid fear that time may just be running out.
I had always just assumed I would have children one day. It’s the fairytales we get fed as children, the Prince-like husband, white picket fence, and 2.4 perfect children. But when the gleaming white horse failed to appear over the hills, I started to question whether motherhood was something I would ever get to experience. So I took action.
Taking action
I’m a life coach and being proactive is part of my MO in life, so I reached out to a fertility clinic and had a very, well, clinical, zoom consultation with a doctor who told me in great detail how babies are made before informing me, ever so gently, that the bloods I had sent in showed I had a low and ever-decreasing egg count and if I wanted to have kids I should hop to it.
This was 2021, Covid restrictions were just lifting and, bar one or two disastrous sober day dates walking in a park 5 metres from each other, I hadn’t laid eyes on a man in months.
The lockdown had made me feel claustrophobic and with all my work having gone remote I decided that my 40th year would be spent travelling Europe with my little dog Molly. I needed to set my itchy feet free into the world in the hopes of meeting someone new, or, perhaps just meeting myself for a good long chat about what I wanted my future to look like. I had some soul searching to do – if I didn’t meet anyone, would I actually be brave enough to have a baby on my own?
I followed a few ‘Solo Moms’ on Instagram and had plenty of gay friends who had had babies through sperm donation so I knew it was something that was becoming more of the norm. I was financially stable, owned my own apartment and knew I had a lot of love to give. But I also loved my single, childfree life, I travelled a lot, went out for dinners with friends and had freedom to do whatever I pleased. I also felt like having a baby on my own would close the doors to me ever meeting someone. But I also had two trueisms I was in constant battle with. Did I want to have a baby on my own? No, I didn’t. But did I want to spend the rest of my life without having children? Also, no. So one of those would eventually need to cross the other out, and as I said earlier, time was running out.
The best laid plans
After an absolutely incredible year solo-travelling across Europe, travelling 30,000kms, visiting 11 countries and countless cities, I made my way back to a city and home I loved and decided that now was the time to put my proverbial eggs into the fertility doctor’s basket. At first I asked a very wonderful, magnanimous and incredible gay friend of mine if he would like to be my Baby Daddy.
I knew he and his husband had discussed kids and thought maybe this could be a great solution to all our child-free existences. At first he agreed, and in fairness to him, went through all the tests needed to be taken, but after a lot of soul-searching on both our parts, we decided it wasn’t going to work so I decided to go it alone.
In January 2024, with the help of my mother, who took to the task like we were looking through an Avon catalogue, I picked some very fine sperm from a lovely Danish chap who was into forestry and had a good family history and looked cute in the baby pic I saw of him on the sperm bank website.
In February, I went to the clinic for my first solo round of IUI fertility. I had spent a month injecting myself and having tests and suddenly the time was right for 29 million sperm, the nurse happily informed me, to be artificially injected into my cervix. It felt right and wrong all at once. I was terrified but confident that I could do this. I had lots of familial and friend support and it was all going to work out beautifully, I told myself over and over.
Sadly though, it didn’t. After three more rounds of IUI and three more rounds of money exiting my bank account I decided to call it a day. I had tried. And trying was the one thing I felt was an important step I needed to take to ensure that I didn’t lie on my deathbed full of regret for the child I never had, or even tried to have.
Letting go
That was April 2024, when I closed the door on motherhood. Watching as she packed up her teddies and diaper bag and headed off into my future, down a path I wouldn’t now be venturing. And that’s the thing, I knew I had two paths in life, one where I was a mother and happy and one where I was childfree and equally happy. Both lives, I knew, could and would be beautiful I just had to make the best of the path I was on.
Part of that happiness for me, had included letting go of ‘looking for love’. My coaching mentor had done a coaching session with me a year before where he did a ‘Letting Go’ exercise on me. It is a powerful coaching exercise that explores the notion that we can’t have what we want and we can’t want what we have. So in order to have, we must first let go of the want. So I let love go. I let looking for it earnestly go and instead focused on just being me, happy and content with the life I had.
I had started a podcast in 2023 called ‘Solo Powered’ that celebrated doing things solo, and on it I had said several times that I had let go of looking for love, but it didn’t mean I was closed off to it. I had said that if I was in a bar one night and some man saw me and he was interesting and interested and asked me for my number, I would absolutely give it to him. But other that that I wasn’t searching anymore.
The power of manifestation
Now I am a massive believer in Manifesting. I have manifested many things in my life but I couldn’t quite believe the turn my life was about to take when, in June 2024, two months after I said goodbye to motherhood, I walked into my local pub, a place I rarely frequented, with my Australian Air BnB guest for a Thursday quiz night. My guest knew no one in Ireland and on a sunny summer’s evening, both of us bored at home, I randomly suggested we go to the pub for a quiz I had always wanted to partake in. She jumped at the chance to try her first Guinness so off we went and, lo and behold, sitting at the bar was a man who I immediately fell head over heels in love with. He looked at me and I looked and him and, boom, something magical past between us. But then he promptly stood up, gave me a brief nod along with his killer smile and he and his two work colleagues left the pub.
Crestfallen for all of 5 seconds, I put it down to a brief encounter and ordered two pints of Guinness for me and my Antipodean friend. Unbeknownst to me, said man had gone across the road to another pub and, half way through his pint turned to his friends and said, ‘Lads, let’s go back to that bar, I need to talk to that girl.’ So, back they came and after a few more pints of Dutch courage, they sidled up to us at the bar. We spent the rest of the night in a bubble, of house-on-fire-getting-to-know each otherness. He was interesting and interested and when he asked me for my number and a goodnight kiss I promptly gave him both. We met for our first date just four days later and a week on from that, a week of barely being apart, we exchanged our first ‘I love you’s’.
Expecting the unexpected
What is it ‘they’ say – ‘When you know, you know’? And boy, did we know. On the Thursday of that first week, on what was technically our 4th date, I asked him if he had any relationship red flags. He hesitated before asking me if I wanted to have kids. He was 46 and had two beautiful teenage daughters from a previous marriage that had ended amicably. Knowing this, and slightly taken aback by his, ‘straight in there with the do you want kids question’, I said, ‘Well, I presume you don’t?’ He gently told me that for him his ‘having babies ship’ had sailed so if I wanted kids it was something we should probably talk about. Thanking him for his honesty I took a deep breath and filled him in on my failed solo parenting journey and how I too, had waved goodbye to parenthood. I told him about my low egg count and how it hadn’t worked out and he commended me for my bravery and we continued the night basking in the glow of our new found intimacy. I watched as the version of me with the teddies and diaper bag got further and further down the path and out of view.
Which was why in August 2024, just two months later, when two bright blue lines appeared on a pregnancy test I had taken purely for peace of mind, our love bubble was burst wide open. It was a shock to say the least, and we struggled with what to do. We spent weeks discussing our options, and we discussed all of them. Ultimately, we decided that this was a blessing and what is it ‘they’ say – ‘it’ll happen when you least expect it.’ So, there we were, expecting it.
What we weren’t expecting though was the blood that would flow just a few weeks later. The pain that would come from a gruesome and traumatic miscarriage, just 4 months into our new found relationship. It was heartbreak tinged with trickles of relief because, let’s be honest, it was all too much too fast and hard for my ‘closed off to motherhood’ heart to take. But the sadness was palpable as, for a few short weeks, I had allowed myself to believe that motherhood was making her way back to me.
As we picked up the pieces of baby loss, many a well-meaning soul said things like ‘you can try again’ and ‘what’s meant for you won’t pass you by’ but it wasn’t like that for us. We had already discussed not having kids and this surprise and the subsequent aftermath had been a lot to take. Which is why after a lot of discussion, my love booked himself in for a vasectomy.
Meant to be
On February 4th 2025, the deed was done. That morning, I had one final cry in the shower and said one final goodbye, for the fourth time in 10 months, to motherhood. That was it, ‘not meant to be’ as ‘they’ say. I cried for my sad womb, a womb that had been a bit all over the place since the miscarriage, a womb that was late that month, but a womb who had had very little chance of getting pregnant as we had been so careful. But there was that one night in January, that one slip when we had had one too many nightcaps. I had a pregnancy test in the cupboard but surely it was just late, I thought, as my love hobbled home from the vasectomy clinic, and sat on the couch nursing his bruised balls.
But then there they were at 4pm just an hour and a half after he had gotten home from the clinic, two bright blue lines. I was pregnant, I was screaming, I was crying, my love was bewildered, shocked, head in hands. This couldn’t be happening, could it? And then there she was, with her diaper bag and teddies at the door of the toilet, smiling and eager. The path I hadn’t trodden suddenly awash with flowers and fauna and glowing under a bright beaming sun.
I write this 18 weeks pregnant, I felt the first kicks just yesterday. I write this after my amazing, wonderful love and I have fully embraced this wild journey, the wild out-of-the-blue, crazy, unexpected but ultimately happy, exciting and magical journey we are on.
‘Well, isn’t that just meant to be,’ they say. And for the first time, I fully understand what ‘they’ meant all along.
