Why I built Create & Cope

Making room for you in this journey

👋🏻 Hi. I'm Becky.

If you read the last post, you know about the van and the jewellery. That's the practical answer to how Create & Cope got built. This is the other answer. The one about why.

⏰ The loud ticking noise

It started on an ordinary afternoon, spending the day with a friend and her little boy. Nothing went wrong, we enjoyed a lovely afternoon playing in the park. But I came home and sobbed. There was a loud noise felt around my body, the ticking sound was so loud. I was the only one who could hear it though.

That was the beginning of our fertility journey, the 7️⃣years of it and we‘re still living with it today three years after having a little one. It's another chapter in our journey but that story is for another day. A year of trying went by before we went to the GP. Even admitting and facing a GP was difficult. We were sent away to try for another year. Then tests, between both of us. Clomid, three times. One round of IUI, the month before lockdown. One round of IVF on a high protocol, which harvested nothing. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I collapsed at work.

We were buying our forever home, ready for a family. I was being bullied at work. I was having ‘the’ tests/scans. It accumulated past what I could carry and my body made the decision for me. I left on sick leave, and what I felt wasn't sadness, it was failure, and the shame of failure. I thought I should be able to manage it all, shouldn’t I? Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? But nothing prior to this had built me for this journey. No education on actual fertility, the 1 in 6 that this affects. 

Other people appeared to manage, or so I thought. But we’re all just performing for others. It’s exhausting.

📞 Then there was a phone call. 

“It is highly unlikely you will have your own children”. There were more words after that, but I don't remember them, because I was on the floor. I saw myself in the mirror afterwards, face distorted, I didn't even recognise the person looking back.

My daughter was conceived using a donor egg. I'm telling you that because I won't hide it. It’s the end of one story and the start of another. We all have our own stories and they will be unique to you. Comparison is hard not to do in this journey, I found myself lost in a rabbit hole on many occasions. But here at Create & Cope, I’d encourage you not to compare, because everyone is suffering in their own way; what we all need is compassion in this journey. I built the Toolkits to take some of the pressure away from the comparison. To find alternative ways to cope in the everyday. 

One way for me to manage the journey was to project manage. It's a skill I have and it was something I knew how to do well. My brain 🧠needed a next step, always a next step. I still need a next step, a symptom from the other side of the journey and a habit I’m struggling to break. I am working on it.

For a long time I assumed I had been doing it wrong, that I should have been softer about it, more feeling, less organised. In hindsight I felt it, every.single.day of it.

Organising and planning things are my coping mechanisms. And in seven years, the constant daily challenge was filling up my time, filling up the ordinary days. Pushing away the black cloud because the weight 🪨 of it, crushing me every day, was immense. Some days it breached. The wave 🌊 of emotion gave way, like a dam bursting through a crack, the walls collapsing around me. It took days to rebuild the dam, it took days to rebuild my energy 🪫 levels. The ordinary everyday things helped rebuild the dam. Mark helped rebuild the dam. So did Chewie, our dog, who understood none of it and still needed his walk, whatever kind of day it had been. Some days that walk was the only reason I went outside.

Letter B - from the A-Z Fertility Language Guide - Breach of emotion

So I made a box 📦. Filled with things to do, to fill the emptiest of days.

I reached for it on the worst days; the breach of emotion days. I reached for it on ordinary days. The decisions were already made so I didn’t have to. Most days my brain was in freeze ❄️ mode. 

That box is what Create & Cope grew out of.

I’m not building a programme. I’m building a place. I'm not here to fix anybody, you are who you need to be right now. There's no set method, no five steps to getting through this.

What I can do is make room. For the anxiety, the grief, the jealousy, the exhaustion, the days you can't do anything at all. 

You can start with the A-Z Fertility Language Guide, words and notes that are not clinical but describe your everyday. Words for the parts of this that are often hard to explain. Then there’s the Toolkits, is there one for you right now? 

I’ve only just begun with Create & Cope, I have so many more ideas and there will be more coming, slowly, because right now it's just me.

With warmth

Becky

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