'I decided to pursue motherhood alone. Trying to conceive felt salacious, controversial.'

This is an edited extract from Inconceivable by Alexandra Collier published by Hachette, available now. 

In the lead-up to Christmas, just before I started fertility treatment, I went to the acupuncturist, I jogged, I trained at the gym. I meditated. I felt like my body had become a thing to be tuned and trained and constantly improved upon. 

I went to a wildcrafter – a kind of naturopath-cum-witch. ‘To be a mother, you need to learn how to mother yourself,’ the wildcrafter told me in her gentle Canadian accent. I wondered how to do that exactly. 

‘Your womb is a garden,’ she explained. ‘You’ve left it quite late to tend the garden but we’ll do our best.’

The wildcrafter mixed me up a sludgy brew of herbs for my womb garden that tasted like a dredged pond. As I drove home, I tried to visualise my womb, but I could only picture a rubbish heap full of weeds.

At night, before bed, I wrote letters in my journal to my yet- to-be-conceived child. You will not be deterred by all this talk, I wrote. You will stick and grow. You will be mine and I will be yours. I can’t wait.

Watch: Meshel Laurie shares what it's like to go through IVF alone. Story continues after video.

Then a few days later: There is no knowing if it will work and if it does, what terror and joy may follow.

I was not all saintly though. The ad agency I worked for had a Christmas party which I mentally christened ‘My Last Hurrah’. Even though I’d stopped drinking these last few months, if there was an event that required alcohol to be bearable it was the work Christmas party.

In the backroom of a city restaurant, with hard echoey surfaces, the chatter of my colleagues rose to a roar, induced by too much wine and too little food. I sat at a long table, feeling blanketed by tipsiness, by the safety of my smart, female colleagues around me. I turned to find my boss, Trev, taking a seat next to me.

Trev was a loud, brash man in his fifties who liked to shadowbox his way through the office. ‘So, Ally,’ he interrupted the chatter with his booming voice. ‘Do you have a partner?’

The table fell quiet. Everyone was waiting. A hot clod of embarrassment was spreading out from my chest. I considered making a joke but the silence had stretched on for too long and I was all out of jokes. ‘No, I don’t.’ I shook my head. Trev stared at me, waiting for an explanation. Everything in me wanted to make excuses, to justify my disreputable single status. I clamped my mouth shut. You don’t have to fucking explain yourself to anyone.

I rarely spoke about my dating life at work. And I’d been keeping my upcoming fertility treatment a secret. All of it felt like a green shoot of hope curled up inside me that had to be protected from the threshing machine of productivity and timesheets and branding jargon. Trying to conceive alone felt salacious, controversial. I wanted to keep it from my colleagues, many of whom were married with children.

After lunch, we piled into minibuses and went to a pub that had once been a dank dive but had a newly renovated polish and served espresso martinis, which I drank two of in quick succession. The air was filled with that anarchic end-of-year rush where colleagues who were half strangers began to show their shadow selves.

A few hours later, I found myself out on the footpath just as it started pounding steamy, summer rain. Next to me were a group of kids – they must’ve been barely in their twenties – who shrieked drunkenly. The girls were in shrink-wrapped skirts and daggered heels, the boys in muscle t-shirts, swaying and cheering. I was suddenly old.

Two days later, after the hangover had subsided, I was restless and anxious to begin. I stared down at my belly in bed. It was flat, lifeless. I was ready to take my future into my own hands. To get on the train, or the rollercoaster, and depart. I thought of Mara. Before having her daughter, she’d been through numerous rounds of failed IVF, a missed miscarriage and a botched surgery.

Scrolling down the feed of my solo mum Facebook group, there were endless threads detailing disappointing IVF cycles. A dark inventory trailed many of these women: ectopic pregnancies, endometriosis, the loss of fallopian tubes, IVF pregnancies with no heartbeat.

Listen: The Quicky speaks to a woman who went through years of IVF and a medical specialist to find out what prospective parents should know before they embark on this journey. Story continues after podcast.

Mara had told me that she’d thought about having a second child but while she could countenance disappointment, she couldn’t take on the cost – she estimated that she’d spent $43,000 on her first. And although there was a perception that women pursuing IVF were forty-something careerists with means, the solo mums I’d met in Australia spanned age and backgrounds and professions.

These women online, whose names and faces I felt affection and familiarity with, had saved money, forfeited expensive trips and nights out with friends. They had babysat other people’s children on weekends to pay for treatment. They had repeatedly lived through the wait of hope and heartbreak that was stretched between embryo transfer and blood test. Their selfless actions spoke of devotion – the quality we ask of mothers.

Flicking through their stories, I wondered if I had three or six years of failed treatments in me – if I could countenance the maddening despair and the financial cost? If I would have to measure how much it was worth – to my sanity, to my bank account – to have a baby alone?

I couldn’t afford more than a few rounds of IUI treatment. I’d wilfully and blindly avoided thinking too far ahead about what it could cost – about what credit could be maxed, about what lengths I would travel and debts I would shoulder to become a mother. About how the process could crush my spirit. I didn’t let my mind drift to the other women I knew, the ones for whom IVF, despite years of trying and paying, had not worked. The women who were childless, and not by choice.

Images: Supplied by Hachette. 

This is an edited extract from Inconceivable by Alexandra Collier published by Hachette, available now.