Content note: this article contains references to miscarriage and baby loss that readers may find upsetting. 

“It’s here – we’ve received the dreaded email,” I said to myself. The email that most couples who have been through fertility treatment receive at some point in their journey. The ‘Your storage is up for renewal’ email. We currently have five vials of sperm in storage at the fertility clinic, and they’ve been there since 2017.

How we got here

In 2017, we were newlyweds living in a state of married bliss. We were Laura and Sarah, a couple who, in a lot of ways, had already defied the odds: we grew up thousands of miles apart (I’m American; Sarah’s from Reading), but we started work on the same day, at the same company and in a city we had both separately just moved to. We hated each other when we first met, but hate and love are two sides of the same coin. We quickly grew to appreciate our differences and fell in love – for each of us, it was our first LGBTQ+ relationship. After just 10 months together, we hopped over to Australia, where we lived together for a year, then moved back to the UK where we settled, got engaged and became the first female couple to be legally married in the City of Westminster on the first day of marriage equality in England.

We’d talked about whether we wanted children, and the conversation had gone back and forth for months between us, so we finally added a deadline: we would decide for good if we wanted to go through the process of having children during a big family trip to the US in May 2017.

It was there, waking up in my home country, that I turned to Sarah and said, “I’d really love us to try for a baby.”

The plan was for Sarah to carry our firstborn and for me to carry our second. The first part of our plan worked well – Sarah had one round of IVF, which resulted in four embryos, the first of which became our first daughter, Annabelle, and the remaining three were then frozen in storage alongside our remaining sperm while we fell in love with being a family of three. We absolutely adored being mums; when Annabelle was two and a half years old, we decided we would try for another baby. 

This is where our well-laid plan took a bit of a detour. When we went to the clinic to get started, we were greeted with the bad news that I had very few eggs. The clinic recommended we use Sarah’s frozen embryos instead. I was initially upset by this; I had just lost my mum and had hoped to be able to see glimpses of her in our future child, but I quickly remembered what I had always known: that genetics don’t matter, that Annabelle was no less my child than Sarah’s because she didn’t come from me. So, we went ahead with our first transfer from Sarah’s frozen embryos. And it took! We couldn’t believe it, we were so excited.

I struggled through the first trimester’s symptoms – so happy that I was able to carry this baby – but when we had our first scan at eight weeks’ gestation, on my birthday, there was no heartbeat. The baby had stopped growing. It was a massive shock; I had been nauseous, I’d had all the symptoms I felt I was supposed to have, and I continued to have these symptoms until I miscarried a week or so later. We were both devastated, and I no longer trusted my body could do this.

After recouping, we tried again with the second frozen embryo, which didn’t take. After a pause, I nervously went in for the final transfer, completely alone because of Covid rules. Sarah and Annabelle waited in the car outside. I knew that if this embryo didn’t take, it was the end of my chance to carry a baby, as my fertility was so low. We planned to try Sarah again, and then have Annabelle be an only child if she wasn’t successful.

But it did. Our little last chance, our rainbow baby, the worst-graded embryo we had – she came through. She stuck with me through anxiety and numerous late-night scans as I’d lost faith in my body’s ability to do what it was ‘meant’ to. She reassured me with kicks at all times of the day and night, and Matilda joined our family in October 2021.

Replying to the email

Annabelle is now five and Matilda is almost two. But when that dreaded ‘Your storage is up for renewal’ email dropped into our inbox, my heart sank. It’s something we were abstractly aware of – the five vials in a freezer at a clinic in Birmingham – but neither of us had mentioned it or what it meant for our family. I wasn’t really ready to make that final decision. I left it unread in our joint inbox for about a week, until one night I brought it up with Sarah over spaghetti bolognese. 

“Did you see the email from the clinic?” I asked. She’d seen it as well but hadn’t said anything, recognising that it deserved more than a rushed conversation around our responsibilities with the kids. So we made the time. We talked about the pros and cons of trying for number three. Who would carry? Could we financially afford it? How would it affect our daughters and their differing needs at this point in their lives? What would our life look like as a family of five?

As we discussed, it was clear that while I held onto a glimmer of hope that I may get to carry again and hold another baby, Sarah (always the more logical and pragmatic one of us) was ready to move onto that next stage of parenting – being out of that baby stage and into exploring the world with our girls. I wanted that too – to move out of survival mode and enjoy the wonderful kids we have.

But if I’m honest with myself, I want another baby – just because I love babies. So who’s to say when the third baby got to 18 months old, I wouldn’t be itching for a fourth?

We have our two beautiful girls and we’ve said that we are finished time and time again. I found pregnancy difficult with all the anxiety and exhaustion, which only got worse once Matilda was born, as she didn’t sleep for more than three hours at a time until after her first birthday. We can’t picture going through it all again: the stress, worry, financial burden, the physical toll of being pregnant and having an infant (plus two more to take care of). We’ve started giving away our baby stuff. Ultimately, the realisation we both came to is that neither of us feels like anything is missing from our family. Our heads say it’s the end of our fertility journey, and our hearts reluctantly agree.

But the honest truth is it was really hard to reply to that email, to put in writing that we were not going to renew our storage. It felt so final. Any faint sparkle of potential and possibility was gone. The silver lining to a very emotionally heavy cloud is that the sperm can go back to the bank, so it won’t be destroyed. Better still, other families with our donor will have access to more of the sample, should they need it. But we sat on our final confirmation reply for a few weeks before pressing send.

Our family is complete. I know it, Sarah knows it. We are happy. We have the most amazing kids we could have ever hoped for. We don’t need to hold onto this storage. Right? Right. Together we sat down, the email open in front of us and the reply written out. We held hands as we clicked send together.

We said goodbye to our fertility journey knowing we were moving forward hand in hand with everything we could have ever asked for.

Images: Getty

Baby On The Brain – a Stylist podcast about the challenges of pregnancy and parenting – is back for a second series. As many of you will know, the first series was about pregnancy and how that changes every part of a woman’s life – even in the smallest ways. This second series is about returning to work after maternity leave.