ISSUE 38: answering the frozen embryo question at the dinner table
"But where was I"? He asked me, the obvious keeper of the cards. "in a freezer" I said before I could stop myself. IVF will (in fact) always be with me & five fun things for good measure.
The Debrief is a weekly newsletter - forever honest and aesthetic driven. This week I’m talking IVF so if that’s a sensitive subject for you or if you struggle with infertility you may want to opt out of reading. Otherwise you may want to join me in a virtual glass of red bubbly (this is Lola Nero Red Sparkling & it’s perfect for fall evenings at the dinner table while you have wild conversations with your six year old).
“So where was I?” Ben asked as I quickly ran through the feasible possibilities that I could share with him.
“You were in a freezer.” The words were out of me before my brain could do damage control.
“The FREEZER???” He asked pressing his tiny hands against the edge of the table and doing a precarious balancing act on the back two legs of his chair.
We were all sitting at the dinner table, yet I was silently deemed the person to take on this conversation (who am I kidding, I’d been half excited, half terrified of it ever since the first annual frozen embryo bill arrived in our mailbox one year after our first and only round of IVF - 13 years ago).
“Well I don’t mean the literal freezer.” I remained rooted to my seat quickly calculating a mental course of action while also hoping he didn’t pitch the chair completely backwards in his sudden desperate state of unfolding. “I mean you weren’t fully formed yet. You were like a dot and they kept you safe until it was time for us to have you.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“But where was I?” he asked again, likely trying to reconcile the image of the freezer that sits in our garage with some hypothetical baby freezer constructed quickly in his mind.
And while we had never kept the fact that he had been a frozen embryo for six years a secret - casually testing out the words frozen to him in the sling as an infant, while pushing him on the swing at the park as a toddler. This was the first time it was obvious that he now wanted to understand.
“You were at the fertility clinic.” I answered truthfully.
“So I wasn’t with you?” He took the longest breath and then just killed me a little when he said, “that’s sad.”
“You were only the size of a spec of salt Ben,” Alice rushed in with a balm to sooth this rather harsh discovery.
“Salt! You can hardly even see salt!” He’s giggling now so I feel things heading to a less treacherous place.
We all started explaining how many eggs they retrieved, how many sperm and eggs together made embryos, how they grew the embryos for five days, how two of them were pretty strong but one needed some time to grow, how sperm are like fish and then we had to ask alexa whether boys were born with sperm like girls are with eggs and thus the conversation completely turned to hilarity.
So now he knows. But this is of course the light side of the story. If I were to be honest I could write a novel about all of the feelings around Ben, Alice and Isla and the insane miracle that is IVF.
(and here he is 6 years frozen, and 6 years out)
On a lighter note - I started listening to Station Eleven yesterday after wrapping up The Glass Hotel. I usually don’t gravitate towards post pandemic fiction but The Glass Hotel was so good that I figured it was worth the risk.
Have you read it?
On an exciting note - I opened a shop!
After years of designing shops for other people I finally hit publish on my own. Right now there are two of my most popular year end and new year services available in the shop. Come and visit my new shop here.
5 things from the week
1 | and.bloom and rosieannbutcher are giving me all kinds of wardrobe inspo lately
2| Oh the power of a patterned cardi with jeans and a tee
3 | This CC cream in Bye Undereye is made of actual magic and this liquid exfoliant tames all the change of season skin fussiness
4 | The perfect pop of white (I love their leather chelsea boots for winter)
5 | This mockup is so good it’s tempting me to design a t-shirt
Want more of this? Send me a DM on Instagram, hire me to design your brand or website.
Thank you for reading. I used to write a lot so this feels good. — Ashley.
As a never-experienced-IVF-child-free person, I never had considered how complex the "where do babies come from" conversation would be to children who are a product of it, it’s fascinating, and really sounds like you did such a fantastic job the first couple times with Isla & Alice with how you described them stepping in on the discussion. Rooting for Andrew to take over the birds and the bees with him, sounds like Ben may bring the theatrics for that one one day 🤣.