I deleted Instagram for six months after my sister announced her pregnancy. That isn’t where this story starts but it might be where it ends, depending on how you look at it.
The pregnancy tests are in my running shoes. The ones I don’t wear anymore because I stopped running when this whole thing started, because every time I ran I would think about my ovaries and whether the jolting was bad for them, which is mad because I wasn’t even pregnant, but that’s where my brain was at.
Eleven tests. All negative. All hidden in a New Balance trainer at the back of the cupboard because I don’t want Sipho to find them and do that face. You know the face. The one where he’s trying so hard not to look sad that he actually looks sadder.
We’ve been trying for three years. Three years and four months, if you want me to be precise about it, which I am, because at some point you stop measuring your life in birthdays and anniversaries and start measuring it in cycles. Day 14. Day 21. Day 28. Day 1. Day 1 again. Day 1 forever, apparently.
I didn’t think it would be us.
I’m thirty-two. I do yoga twice a week, I eat my five-a-day, I drink one glass of red wine on a Saturday like a smug Cape Town wellness influencer, except I live in Linden and I’m not smug, I’m tired. Sipho is thirty-four, he runs and he doesn’t smoke and we have been together since we were both nervous twenty-somethings working in different departments of the same advertising agency. We did everything right. We waited. We saved. We bought the little place in the leafy bit of Joburg with the avocado tree in the back garden, the one I imagined photographing a baby under for those obnoxious newborn shoots. We planned.
The first month we tried, I think I bought a pregnancy test on day 22. I remember being so confident that I bought the expensive Clearblue one, the digital kind that just spells it out for you in English. PREGNANT. NOT PREGNANT. No squinting at lines. I was going to be a Pregnant in clear letters kind of person.
NOT PREGNANT, it said.
I laughed. Honestly, I laughed. Imagine getting pregnant the first month. Imagine. I told Sipho and we both kind of shrugged and ordered pizza.
By month seven I wasn’t laughing anymore.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about trying to conceive: it ruins sex. Not in a dramatic way. In a slow, ugly, administrative way. Sex becomes a calendar event. Sex becomes “babe it’s day 13, can we just do it quickly before MasterChef.” Sex becomes counting backwards from when you might ovulate and then lying flat on your back afterwards with your legs up against the headboard because some auntie on a Facebook group swore it worked for her.
The romance, my god. The romance is the first casualty.
I bought ovulation strips from Dis-Chem. Then a different brand because the first ones were “unreliable” according to a Reddit thread I’d been mainlining at 2am. Then a basal body temperature thermometer that I had to take rectally because apparently oral is “not accurate enough,” which is a sentence I never imagined typing about my own life. I had a spreadsheet. I had a graph. I had a small green folder that said FERTILITY on the front in my own handwriting, like I was running a low-budget medical practice from my dining room table.
Sipho started calling it Operation Avocado. As in, the tree. As in, the baby under the tree.
We laughed about it. We had to.
A year in, I went to my GP. She was kind. She is a kind woman in general, my GP, but she was particularly kind about this, which somehow made it worse. She referred us to a fertility specialist. The waiting list was three months. I cried in the car park when I came out, then I drove to Woolworths and bought a baguette and ate it in the parking lot like a feral child.
The specialist was a man in his fifties with very clean glasses. He asked us a lot of questions. He sent me for blood tests. He sent Sipho for a semen analysis, which Sipho still refers to as “the worst Tuesday of my life.” He scanned my ovaries. He looked at my fallopian tubes. He measured my AMH. He measured my FSH. He measured things I didn’t even know I had.
Everything came back normal.
You would think that would be good news.
It is not good news.
“Unexplained infertility,” he said, which is a phrase that translates roughly to: we don’t know, you’re broken in a way we can’t see, good luck.
I asked him what that meant. He said it meant that on paper, there was no reason we couldn’t conceive. He said it happened in about twenty percent of cases. He said sometimes people in this category just need a little help — IUI, maybe IVF down the line. He said we could “try naturally for another six months” before we escalated, as though we hadn’t already been trying naturally for fourteen months, as though I had any “natural” left in my body.
In the car, Sipho held my hand and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, “So we’re a mystery.”
I started crying then. Not little tears. The big ones. The kind where you can’t get a full breath in and your face goes hot and your nose runs and you don’t even care. I was crying because I had wanted a reason. A blocked tube. A hormonal thing. A fixable thing. I would have taken endometriosis over this. At least with endometriosis there’s a battle. At least there’s a villain. Unexplained infertility is like being told your house is haunted but the ghost is invisible and also possibly your fault.
The financial maths of fertility treatment in this country will make you ill.
A round of IUI is somewhere between R10,000 and R15,000 by the time you’ve added the meds and the scans and the consultation. IVF is closer to R80,000 to R100,000 per cycle once you factor in the medication, and most people don’t get pregnant on the first cycle. Our medical aid covers exactly none of this. We checked. We re-checked. We called the call centre and made the lady read it to us slowly. The PMB stuff covers the diagnosis. The treatment? You’re on your own, sweetheart.
I started doing maths I hated. We could re-mortgage. We could sell the car. We could ask my mother, who has been waiting eighteen months for me to tell her something she could tell her friends at the salon. We could borrow from Sipho’s brother in Australia, who would say yes immediately and then mention it at every family gathering for the rest of our lives.
We picked IUI. Two rounds. Both failed.
The second one was the worst because we had really, really thought it was going to work. I had felt different. I had cramped in a way I’d convinced myself was implantation. I bought baby socks at a Mr Price and hid them in the same New Balance shoe with the tests, which is when I knew I had become something I didn’t recognise.
When the test was negative I threw the socks in the bin outside the Engen on William Nicol so I wouldn’t have to see them in my own dustbin.
This is the part where, in a normal article, I tell you it all worked out. That we did IVF and now I have a six-month-old called Lwazi and he sleeps under the avocado tree and the lesson is to never give up.
I don’t have that ending. I’m telling you this from the middle.
We’re saving for IVF. We’re saving slowly because life in Joburg is expensive and we both still have to pay our bond and eat. I have a moodboard on my phone of what the nursery will look like, which is either pathological or aspirational depending on the day. I have a therapist now, a woman in Greenside who asks me hard questions and lets me cry without doing the face. I have a small group of women I met on an Instagram support page who I have never met in real life but who I would die for, three of whom live in Pretoria and one in Pietermaritzburg and one who has just found out, after four years of IVF, that she’s twelve weeks pregnant. We screamed in our group chat for an hour when she told us. Then I went to the bathroom and cried for ten minutes and went back and screamed some more, because both of those things were true at once, and I’m learning that’s allowed.
Sipho and I had a bad patch last year. I’m not going to go into it because some of it isn’t mine to tell. But we got through it. We see a couples counsellor twice a month. He’s started running again. I’ve started painting, badly, in the spare room that I refuse to call the nursery even though that’s what it is.
I don’t know how this story ends. I want to lie to you. I want to tell you that I have wisdom and that I’ve made peace with it and that there’s a tidy little bow on the whole thing. But the truth is that yesterday I cried at a Pampers advert and last week I unfollowed three more people on Instagram because their pregnancy announcements were too creative and the week before that I had the best day I’ve had in a year, where I forgot about it for almost six whole hours and felt like myself again.
That’s the journey. That’s the actual journey. Not the inspirational LinkedIn post version. The version where you keep going because what else are you going to do, where some days are okay and some days you eat a baguette in a parking lot, where you save for a treatment that might not work and you let yourself hope anyway, because the alternative is to stop hoping, and I’m not ready for that.
The pregnancy tests are still in my New Balance.
I think I’ll keep them there for now.
Inspired by real journeys — names and details changed.
Anonymous | Johannesburg, Gauteng | Unexplained Infertility
Have a fertility journey to share? Whether you’re at the start, in the messy middle, or holding a baby you fought hard for — your story could be the one that makes another South African feel less alone tonight.
Submit your story to Fertility Solutions.
Email us at info@fertilitysolutions.co.za
