I’ve been asked tonight if my child is an only child by choice or not and I don’t know the answer. I wanted somewhere to work out how I feel about it, I hope that’s ok?
If you’d have asked me 10yrs ago I would have said I wanted 2, maybe 3 kids. Then it took 5yrs and 2 rounds of ivf to get ds. After such a struggle to get pg I then had problems in pg resulting in an early induction which left me with pnd ptsd and anxiety which was undiagnosed until 3 years later.
The first, failed ivf put such a strain on our relationship that we said we’d not do it again, we were at breaking point. It took over a year before we went back for round two and even now I’m not quite sure what finally convinced us to try again. Once we had ds we knew we wouldn’t put ourselves through ivf again because we had so much more to lose: if it broke us up then it would break up our child’s family, we didn’t want to miss out on his childhood spending all our time and energy on fertility treatment and because I was only working pt we couldn’t raise the cash (and I refused to do it on credit or a loan)
However with my ptsd, pnd and anxiety and the events which resulted in that (which would likely reoccur in future pg) I’m not sure I’d survive having another. It took six months of counselling and 18 months of antidepressants to lay to rest all the issues I ended up with, I’m terrified of going back to that place again.
So is ds an only by choice or not? I honestly don’t know, I’m just glad the decision was taken out of our hands.
Obviously I just said ‘he’s an ivf baby’ and left it at that.