A guest blog article for the UK military spouse/partner community at Dandelion Families.
Please see the adapted article here.
Hi, I am Elizabeth Simpson, I am many things; a military spouse, a mother, a former science teacher, and these days I am a wellness and resilience coach. But what I wish to share with you is that I am unable to have children without assistance and to share my experience of infertility while experiencing military life with my husband in the Army.
When we embarked on the journey to start a family, both of our work schedules meant that we were both busy, tired, and in my husband’s case, often away. After a year or so of unsuccessfully trying to conceive we started the process of investigations into why, at this time we also took the decision to move into SFA. If you are a teacher or you know one, you’ll know the hours and the pressure teachers experience, and to reduce this, and to help improve my chances of conceiving, I opted to reduce my hours to part time (although I then spent my spare time studying and this is when I caught the psychology bug).
I have always found that due to working and not having children it made it very difficult to meet anyone within our community. In addition, when I did meet people at events such as Mess functions, one of the first things I’d be asked is if I had children and then questions about why not or when. This was uncomfortable and made me feel more of an outsider and left me feeling isolated.
After three years of medical procedures and operations, I had one last operation which left me unable to conceive without assistance. This was a crushing realisation but finally I was free of the ‘trying to conceive’ roller coaster, of the monthly pregnancy tests with its unsympathetic “not pregnant”, no more counting days, timing intimacy, taking my temperature, using fertility tests, taking folic acid, avoiding the odd glass of wine, fertility yoga, fertility acupuncture and no more pressure!!! I finally started to feel a little more like myself.
The team who I was referred to were amazing, and as soon as I’d recovered from the last operation, I was straight into the world of IVF. This involved regular hormone injections and internal ultrasounds, this was straight forward, and when my husband was home, he helped me with the injections and came with me to appointments, but he wasn’t really required for any of it, and so it didn’t make much difference that I did most of that on my own.
IVF requires stimulating the body with hormones to produce as many high-quality mature eggs as possible, to be collected under general anaesthetic and immediately fertilised with sperm. Of course, when the moment came that I was to have my eggs collected and my husband was to provide his half of the deal, he was away on a promotion course! Not knowing anyone well enough to ask for help, I had to ask my mum to visit from the other side of the country so I could have someone take me to the hospital and home again because I was unable to drive after general anaesthetic. My husband was unable to get the time off for this very important day, but he was given a late start, and so he arrived at the hospital as soon as it opened to do his one job in the whole thing, and then rapidly got back to his training in Wales. Our first daughter was therefore conceived while my husband and I were in two different countries.
Just to give you a little more information about the IVF process, the fertility team watch the fertilised eggs become blastocysts, then they watch these turn into developing embryos, they then choose an embryo that displays qualities that indicate it has the highest probability of growing into a baby when transferred back into the body.
We were unbelievably lucky that our first round of IVF was successful, and other than the usual trials and tribulations of pregnancy and birth, all went well, my husband was home and was given time off to attend my induction and stayed with me for the first few weeks of her life.
However, as with the way things go in the Army, within weeks of her birth I was left to recover on my own while he was sent overseas for a couple of weeks for training and then adventure training. My husband and I requested that he didn’t attend the adventure training so he could support me while I was recovering, and rather than compassion and empathy I was told no, that other wives have had to give birth on their own when their serving partners have been overseas in conflict, and if they could do it on their own I could manage my recovery on my own too. The expectation on me was to be resilient and independent, the expectation on my husband was to leave me to it and attend the allotted adventure training. Through his sheer determination he returned home early having paid for a private flight.
If we were unsuccessful in this round, at the time, we were entitled to up to three rounds of IVF under the Armed Forces Covenant, as at the time, this was the maximum number of rounds available throughout the UK, and the Covenant supports the armed forces community by ensuring we are not disadvantaged by the serving person’s career and therefore the health care postcode lottery shouldn’t impact us.
We were posted a couple of months after my daughter was born, this time even further from family and I found it very hard to get to know other people in the area. I felt very isolated and had a real knock to my sense of independence when I was unable to find a teaching job. It was clear at that point I was in for a longer career break than I had planned, and so we decided to use that time wisely by trying IVF again. As soon as I had stopped nursing, I started hormone treatment at a private clinic on a self-funded cycle. Once again, with no one around to help us I was on my own, well almost, every appointment I attended I was accompanied by my one-year-old, as I didn’t have anyone to support me with childcare, but she loved going in to see the fish!
We had one embryo transferred and six embryos frozen. The fresh transfer didn’t work, I found it hard to read that ‘not pregnant’ display on the pregnancy test, with the added pressure that it had cost us so much money for the treatment.
We decided to give it one more try, we had a frozen embryo transfer, and this time it worked!
Our second daughter was born during the pandemic and my husband was home just in time. We were really lucky that my husband and a small group of his colleagues were flown home early from working in the Falkland Islands, if the Army hadn’t selected him to return home early, lockdown restrictions and cancelled flights would have meant he would have returned with the rest of his colleagues, arriving when our daughter would have been two months old.
One year later we had to undergo the heart breaking decision to opt out of storing our last five frozen embryos, and therefore, our IVF journey came to an end.
Infertility and IVF is no more or less difficult when your partner is in the armed forces, however, often life as a spouse/partner is isolating with an added expectation to simply get on with it, no matter how sad you feel or how challenging it all is. Unfortunately, this expectation of unrelenting resilience and having to manage on our own is expected of all military spouse/partners all of the time. These feelings of isolation and challenge are compounded during the times you are feeling vulnerable before, during and after childbirth. Judgements are made on us, in terms of our resilience, but I believe it is not the case that you are either resilient or not resilient, but at times your usual coping strategies and resources have changed, or just aren’t helping you at that time.
Having spent nearly a decade of my life trying to conceive, going through three rounds of IVF, two pregnancies, and two periods of nursing, I was very much ready to return to the world of adults and fulfilling work. I was successful in passing the recruitment process with Samaritans and this work gave me back a sense of purpose outside of my house, and I was preparing to return to university to finish my master’s degree, however, the Army had other plans. This time my husband was to be posted overseas, and I had the option of living on my own with my two daughters to accomplish my ambitions or to adjust my plans and relocate with him.
As a mother I have an expectation on me to be the primary caregiver and my husband has an expectation for his role of parent to be secondary to his military career. I find that people make a judgement that because I experienced quite a struggle in starting a family that my family are my only source of joy and fulfilment, and even maybe my proudest achievement. This is not the case. Just like everyone who reads this, I am a unique individual with unique ambitions, sources of joy and sources of meaning in my life. Although I do not feel a sense of pride in starting a family against the odds, I experience extraordinary pride when I witness my remarkable daughters experience something new and wonderous in the world around them and their own influence on it.
I chose to relocate with my husband, this was solely based on the fact that my family brings me my greatest joy and I wouldn’t want to live a moment separated if I have a choice in it. In preparation, I amalgamated my training and experience in psychology, counselling, coaching, volunteering, education and working with spouse/partners to build a Wellness and Resilience Coaching business, specialising in supporting military spouses/partners during those times when challenge and change require more than your current toolkit has in it.
I believe, as military spouses/partners we have two tools that no one can deny us, the first is self-compassion, even when others around us are not compassionate or willing to understand our situation. The second is a readymade community of spouses/partners who just get it. Although at times it is difficult to expand our local support network, it is fundamental we take proactive steps to surround ourselves with people who listen to our concerns without judgment and make us feel that we are not alone during the times we feel most vulnerable, such as fertility issues, pregnancy, and post birth.
If you are interested in working with me or would like to find out more about wellness and resilience coaching please get in touch.
Written by Elizabeth Simpson
30th July 2023
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