Delivering hope

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This article was published 21/06/2022 (1215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Spoiler alert: Morwenna Trevenen’s infertility story has a happy ending. Her book about her fertility journey, however, is a bit more open ended.

Chasing Baby: An Infertility Adventure, out last month via Great Plains Publications, is a chronicle of the seven-year infertility journey Trevenen and her husband Kyle Collins went through to become parents. The failed intrauterine inseminations and invasive procedures, the physically and emotionally draining hormone treatments, an adoption that was reversed less than two weeks later — it’s a lot to go through.

A round of in vitro fertilization resulted in a pregnancy in 2020 and now, the Winnipeg couple are parents to a cherub-cheeked 14-month-old son. But she didn’t want to end Chasing Baby that way. When she was writing her book proposal, the only infertility books she could find followed a similar narrative structure: ‘yeah, it was hard, but now I have a baby.’

“And it kind of made me mad,” says Trevenen, 39, over iced coffees on a June afternoon. “Maybe it was in the depth of all the hormones and the things that they did to my mental state. But I was just like, I don’t like that messaging because I’m torturing myself and hurting myself physically, mentally, emotionally, financially. And the thought of, it’s only really worth it if you have a baby at the end? I feel like that could put me in a dangerous place at the end if it doesn’t work out for us.

“So, it was important for me to have an ending that was like, you’re gonna be fine. If you have a baby? Great. If you don’t have a baby? Still a great life. I promise.”

Trevenen’s book is vulnerable, to be sure — but it’s also very funny. Being able to have a sense of humour about a situation ripe for despair kept both Trevenen and her husband afloat.

“Levity helps, because it gives me perspective, and sort of gets me out of my own head,” she says. “Because it’s so easy to spiral and get super solipsistic, I guess, and just be like, ‘Oh, it’s just me.’”

Humour also serves as an accessible entry point into a difficult subject for readers. Chasing Baby — the title a wink to Kevin Smith’s 1997 comedy Chasing Amy — began its life as a blog, a way for Trevenen to process her feelings around infertility. It was her husband who planted the seed that she might have a book on her hands.

Writing the blog, while Trevenen was in the thick of it, was a different experience than writing the book, which allowed her to take a more reflective posture. She noticed this keenly in the editing process.

“I was like, wow, I was real angry, hey? And it was important to me to keep that there because I wanted people to understand the way that I felt in the moment and going through it,” she says. “But it was interesting to be removed from it and look back and just be like, wow, like, Ooh, I was just full of emotion.”

The book was also written during Trevenen’s fertility treatments, her pregnancy, and navigating life with a newborn. “It was three rounds of super emotional versions of myself working on this book: the hormone-addled one from IVF, the hormone-addled one from pregnancy and the hormone-addled one from postpartum, all working together.”

I first met Trevenen for another story, about what it was like to be pregnant during the pandemic (not great!) That experience, too, didn’t look at all how she thought it would. And, like many mothers who ultimately have a baby after going through infertility struggles, Trevenen feels that pressure to be grateful at all times.

“Sometimes I still look at him and I’m just like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that you’re mine,” she says. “It’s super surreal, after so long, and I feel very lucky. But it’s also adds this sort of flavour to it of, momming is really hard and there’s gonna be moments where you’re just like, argh, you’re so frustrated and so tired. And just like, ‘Mommy needs a break from you right now, love you more than life, need a minute.’ And there’s this sort of like, tinge in the air of like, guilt almost, like, no, be thankful, be thankful, be thankful because it I’m so blessed to be able to have him after such a fight and so many people don’t end up being successful. So there’s sort of a weird guilt that gets attached to it as well.”

But just as her mom friends have reassured her that everything she’s feeling is normal, Trevenen hopes her book can be a similar voice in the wilderness of infertility. She’d love to see more openness around infertility and better maternal care more broadly — though, that’s for another book.

“I’m hoping that it helps people talk more. I’m hoping it makes people feel less alone, because it really is so common. And maybe not everyone is willing to be as open about it as I am and that’s fine, it’s a very private thing. But maybe if they understand more that it is super common, then they wouldn’t feel so alone, even as you’re so isolated going through it.”

Per Health Canada, one in six Canadian couples experience infertility. “Which basically just means that everyone knows someone,” Trevenen says. “They might not know that they know someone going through it, but they do.”

To that end, she would love if people who haven’t experienced infertility also picked up Chasing Baby to give themselves an idea of what it actually means to run this particular gauntlet. So often, when Trevenen told people she was doing IVF, they would respond as though she told them she was thinking of picking up tennis, in large part because they just didn’t understand.

“I was sort of hoping that people would have more of an, ‘Ohhhhhh, my gosh’ response,” she says. “Like, even if you still check and move on, but you’re aware of like, ‘Wow, they went through a lot.’ Give ‘em a hug. Buy her a glass of wine or a box of chocolates or something. Because it’s a lot.”

Chasing Baby: An Infertility Adventure is available at McNally Robinson Booksellers and Indigo.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti