Perth couple Jessie and Em begin their fertility journey

“We are missing some vital baby-making ingredients”

By Jessie Stoelwinder

When you start dating again in your 30s, the conversations can get frank, fast.

One moment you’re making generic small talk about your job, your hobbies, where you like to get a drink on the weekend. And in the next breath, you find yourself dropping the line, “So, do you want kids?”

Some may consider this too bold a topic to broach too soon, preferring to keep things light and flirtatious, but when we are told the age of 35 is effectively a “fertility cliff”, can you really blame us?

It’s hard to be aloof and mysterious when the biological hourglass is spilling sand with every passing second.

So when I begin talking to a witty blonde named Em on a dating app, I’m upfront.

It goes something like this: “I’m 30 and divorced, beyond blessed to have one kid already and hoping for more if I should be so lucky. No worries if that’s not your jam, but let’s first work out if we are on the same page.”

And as luck would have it, she was.

Perhaps it was superficial reasons that led me to swipe right, but it was how candidly we could chat about our shared desire to have children that made us realise it was a common value we both held above all else.

From there, every step we took was intentionally towards building a family together.

Em embraced her new role as mother to my daughter with enthusiasm and patience, and when we were married 18 months later she made separate vows for the both of us.

While getting married wasn’t something we felt was necessary in order to have a baby together, we chose to make the commitment in recognition of the fact that, until just a few years ago, same-sex marriage was not legal in Australia.

We wanted to honour this privilege that so many, including Em, thought might never become a reality for them.

As we edge closer to our two-year wedding anniversary, we don’t yet have the baby we dreamed about in those very early conversations when we first started dating.

For some, a pregnancy can catch them by total surprise – that was the case with my first, which I now feel a pang of guilt about.

For others, all the hoping and planning in the world sometimes feels like it will never be enough in a seemingly endless rollercoaster of cycles and hormones and blank First Response tests.

For us, there’s the extra layer of complexity in that we are missing some vital baby-making ingredients between us as a queer couple.

Em jokes that she’s trying as hard as she can to get me pregnant naturally but for some reason it just doesn’t seem to be working. Cue an awkward silence from whoever she is telling this to, until they realise she is making light of the often-dark journey we find ourselves on.

Everyone’s coping mechanism is different, but humour will prove to be what keeps us afloat as we persevere through treatment at our chosen clinic.

That, and those shared dreams we refuse to give up on.