Louise Thompson

I have decided to try and freeze some fertility while we then still continue to kind of like work on our mental space because this has affected Ryan actually almost worse than it's affected me.

especially when it comes to growing our family.

I think for him, he's just like, why would we risk anything?

I cannot go through that again.

I cannot be the sole parent again.

I can't afford to have some big shift that means that I'm gonna regress and be scary again and not know who I am and not know where I am and have panic attacks all the time.

So for him, he's like clinging on to any stability.

And then I juggle this hard thing where I think, gosh, we're so lucky because I survived.

I'm here and I do have a good standard of living.

I've also got the most amazing child.

He's so beautiful.

But then also growing our family is our legacy and it's our right.

And I should have been allowed the human right of having a safe and dignified birth, which would have allowed me to

leave procreation to chance where you know i could have sex with my partner and maybe maybe have another baby you know and that's not you know i know that fertility struggles are a very real problem and you know we are facing a population crisis there are many reasons why people are leaving having kids until much later in life and and so infertility is an inevitable

reaction to that so I'm absolutely not alone in this infertility journey our circumstances are just really different because you know of just like the scarring that I've been left with yeah and it feels it feels actually quite like

it feels quite nice just to be able to like talk about it and just quite like liberating because it is, you know, when I first worked with therapists quite early on, and I say early on, but probably like at the two year postpartum mark, they would say, oh, you know, if you like, have you thought about having more kids and how does that make you feel?

And that must be desperately upsetting.

And I was like, no, like, don't be ridiculous.

Like, I absolutely couldn't think about any of that.

And I think that there were just different milestones that they were holding me to.