Becoming a mother was never simple for me. It was not an accident, not a surprise, not something that happened on a relaxed Sunday morning and changed everything while the coffee was still warm. It was a decision I made with my whole body and my whole heart, and then I had to fight for it. Quietly. For years. While the world around me assumed it was just a matter of time.
I always had a feeling. Low and steady, not dramatic, just there. A sense that having a baby naturally might not be my path. I cannot explain where it came from. I had all the tests done years before I even met Ivan, everything came back clean. Fully capable, they said. Nothing wrong that we can see. And I held that information and still carried the feeling, because sometimes you know something that the tests simply cannot name.
We got married and we started trying. We were in our early thirties. We wanted this. We were ready, or as ready as anyone ever honestly is. The months passed. Then the years. We tracked everything, followed every window, every sign, every ovulation app notification that thought it was being helpful. We did everything you are supposed to do.
It just did not happen.
I did not talk about it. Almost nobody knew. It is the kind of pain that does not have a natural place in everyday conversation, no seat at the dinner table, no easy opening in small talk. You carry it in the silences between other things. Ivan and I held it between us, and we kept going. Three years of hoping and adjusting and not getting there.
Eventually, we decided to try IVF.
We started in Cork. I will not say too much about it, only that I did not feel seen. The care was private, the appointments were happening, but the connection was missing. And when you are going through something this intimate and this frightening, that matters more than anyone tells you.
So we came to Croatia for the next attempt, and then COVID arrived and made everything harder still, and somewhere in the middle of all of that I found myself sitting in front of a doctor in Zagreb who changed everything about how that chapter felt. He was the kind of doctor you do not forget. Warm, present, genuinely caring. He started treatment immediately and I never once felt like just another file on his desk.
We did a fresh transfer. It did not work. I had what is called a chemical pregnancy, which for anyone unfamiliar means this: your body registers the embryo, your tests come back positive, hope arrives. And then it ends before anything can develop. You are left holding a loss that has no name in most people's vocabulary, because most people did not even know you were hoping.
I had two frozen embryos left from that cycle. I tried both. One at a time, two more trips to Zagreb, two more waits. Neither worked.
The logistics of fertility treatment across countries is something nobody prepares you for. No one hands you a guide. No one explains that you will be booking flights around hormone schedules and embryo thaw dates while also trying to live your normal life in between.
For one of the frozen transfers I flew to Zagreb alone. Ivan could not leave work. I stayed in an apartment by myself, went through the procedure, and came home by myself. The second time, my brother came with me, which helped in the way that having someone familiar nearby always does. But there is one person you want beside you in those rooms, and when he is not there, you feel it in a very specific way.
And then, the day before the implantation, Ivan surprised me. He booked a flight without telling me, arrived earlier than planned, walked through the door, and there he was. My brother was already there, and then Ivan came too, and I held his hand, and something in me that had been very tight for a very long time got a little looser.
That cycle did not work either.
We made a deal after we left Croatia that third time. One more attempt. If it did not happen, we would stop. Not because we had run out of love, or hope, or money. That was not it. I had decided long before that I did not want to become a mother at all costs. The psychological weight of fertility treatment is something almost never spoken about honestly, and it is very real. Each attempt has a beginning and a middle and an end, and the end is either the thing you have been holding your breath for, or another loss you have to put somewhere and carry forward. I was tired. I needed there to be an end point I had chosen myself.
We went to Dublin for the second full cycle, the one we had agreed would be the last no matter what.
I went in full of hope and plans and that particular kind of dreaming where you already picture his face, his little fingers curled around yours, how it would feel. The fear was there too. So was the quiet blame I had placed on myself for years, that feeling I could never fully shake that maybe I was not enough, that my body was not cooperating for a reason I did not understand. Both things were true at once. Hope and doubt sharing the same space, which is more or less the full experience of IVF.
On the day of the egg retrieval, they collected five eggs. All five fertilised, all five developed into good quality embryos. In IVF, not all of them make it that far, so five was genuinely good news. We used two for the fresh transfer and kept three frozen. Those three are still there now, waiting. I think about them sometimes. That is a thought for another day.
The transfer happened in January 2023.
In February, I did a home test. Alone in our house in Cork, while Ivan was out.
I did not plan it as a big moment. I just needed to know before I gave him anything to hope for. After everything we had been through, I could not hand him hope and then have to take it away again. So I did it alone.
The result was positive.
I sat with it for a long time. Happy and terrified and shaking all at once, crying without entirely knowing if it was relief or joy or fear, or all three arriving together. A very strange thing, holding news like that by yourself. I kept it close for days, just for me, until we went to the clinic together for the proper confirmation.
We were pregnant.
We both cried. We were over the moon. And we were both, I think, quietly afraid to fully believe it.
During the pregnancy, I found out that a half-sister on my father's side had died. She was sixteen years old. She had a C-section, came home with her baby girl, and around eight or nine months later, she was gone. A blood clot had formed after her surgery, traveled through her bloodstream, and reached her lungs. They only found it in the autopsy.
I had met her once in person. We had spoken on Facebook a handful of times. I had a quiet tenderness for this young woman I barely knew but who was mine in some way. Her death moved me more than I could entirely explain. Not because we were close, but because she was so young, and because she left a baby girl, and because it happened so silently, with no warning, in the months after what was supposed to be only a beginning.
When I shared this with my doctor, he put me on blood thinners immediately. More needles, after everything. I looked at that new box of injectables on the kitchen counter and I laughed, because sometimes that is genuinely the only response left.
The pregnancy itself was calm and peaceful in a way I had not dared to expect. After everything it had taken to get there, I think I had forgotten that the ordinary version of things was also possible. We settled into it, Ivan and I. We watched him grow. We got ready. And just before everything changed completely, we did something just for us: a last holiday, only the two of us, in the south of Italy. Slow days, good food, sunshine. The last trip as just a couple before we became something else entirely.
On the 23rd of October 2023, Ian arrived.
I am not going to tell the full story of his birth today. Some things need more time before they can be said in the right way. What I will say is that it was the most traumatic experience of my life, and simultaneously the most extraordinary one, and both of those things are completely true and they do not cancel each other out.
The moment he arrived, I was someone I had not met before.
Not the Isa who had spent years wondering if her body was broken. Not the one who had been afraid, who had doubted herself, who had sat alone in our house in Cork holding a positive test and not quite believing it yet. Someone else. Someone who looked at this small, impossibly real person and thought: anything. I will do anything.
The woman is still there, all of her, but there is now also this other thing, this enormous and permanent thing, living right alongside her.
Some people step into motherhood and nothing much changes. Some never wanted it and find themselves in it anyway. But when you have chosen it, truly chosen it, and then had to fight for it with everything you had, when the path there was long and quiet and full of loss you carried mostly alone, arriving is not just arriving. It is a transformation that goes all the way down.
Every morning I open my eyes and his face is the first thing I see. I cannot tell you what that is worth, except to say it is worth every single thing it took to get there. Every needle. Every flight. Every night of sitting with a feeling I could not name and could not share and had to carry forward anyway.
All of it. Every piece.