Built from the inside of the experience. For the people still inside it.

Where it started

My fertility journey didn't begin with a clinic. It began with an ordinary afternoon.

I'd spent time with a friend and her little boy. Came home. And sobbed. Not because anything had gone wrong that day. Because the sound of my body clock was deafening — and nobody else in the room could hear it.

The journey

What followed was seven years of waiting, testing, hoping and grieving. Not one chapter. Many.

Three rounds of Clomid. One round of IUI. One round of IVF — on a strong protocol that produced nothing to harvest. And then a conversation I wasn't ready for: that it was highly unlikely I would ever conceive with my own eggs.

My follicles were too small to produce mature eggs. After six years and losing all will, patienc and with only a hair follicle width of hope left, the path forward was donor egg IVF. I didn't take it well. Nobody would.

What followed — well Covid got in the way and added to our year's long wait. The wait for a donor, the neele in a haystack search, TO FIND HER. It was its own profound process.

I was beyond caring how I got there. The ONLY thing I knew was that I wanted to be a mum.

The career running alongside it

During the journey, I was consoling myself in my marketing career. Always in-house, across multiple industries. Quietly carrying the weight of treatment through environments that were never designed to hold it.

For a significant period, I was working inside a toxic environment — severe bullying by two female line managers that made speaking up about what I was going through almost impossible. At one point, it forced me to pause the journey entirely. I had to choose between the fertility treatment and the career progression. I chose my family.

The bullying was, I was told, the worst case a people forum representative had seen or supported. That validation mattered. It told me I wasn't going mad.

Managing it all became too much. I wanted my new home for the family I wanted to put in it. That was stronger than the job that wasn't supporting me.

The floor parties and the box

During the heaviest days — the two-week waits, the failed cycles, the mornings when the world was too heavy to get up for — there were what my husband called 'floor parties'. When the fear gripped so hard I couldn't breathe, think or process anything.

I found my own community and it inspired me to build a box. I filled it with things to do on the hardest of days — I designed some cards to reach for when my brain was overwhelmed and the decision of what to do next felt like one thing too many. Things to make, touch, do and move with. Something already decided. I just had to reach for the box.

That box has become founding philosophy for Create & Cope.