Noni Martins is a project manager from Southport, and hosts the Unfertility Podcast

It’s been a while since I sat down to write about my journey, and I must admit, I have been putting it off out of the fear of revisiting the pain and disappointment. But I know how cathartic is it for me to write, and I know even more how helpful it might be for someone to read my story, especially as a black African woman.

My name is Noni Martins. I’m a 32-year-old Zimbabwean-Brit and my story began in 2017 when my husband (boyfriend at the time) & I decided we wanted to start trying for a baby.

Looking back, I often wonder whether I spoke my journey into existence. I remember being 14 years old – obviously I had no baby ambitions then – and thinking that I was going to have difficulty having kids. I knew then, just as I know now, that the one thing I wanted more than anything was to be a mother - and so as a way to protect myself from disappointment perhaps, I imagined a worst case scenario. Of course, I didn’t realise then that this imagined worst-case scenario would in fact become my reality years later.

One year came and went. We got married but still there was no baby, so I decided to turn things up a notch. I used several apps, and all the new-age trying-to-conceive gadgets I could find, but the only useful thing that came out of that was finding out that I have very irregular periods. I mean I had always known I did not have a period every 28 days but the apps confirmed this for me in a crystal clear manner. And one of them actually informed me that I had an ‘abnormal cycle’ – measured against data the app had from other users.

Another year came and went – and still no baby. But at no point did I even think about seeing my GP, or speaking to anyone about it. Around me everywhere, all the women I knew seemed to be falling pregnant very quickly. Coupled together with the ‘black women are hyper-fertile’ narrative, I felt an incredible amount of shame that my body was not doing what it is supposed to do, and that kept me silent and alone.

Then one night in April 2019, I had this sudden pelvic pain that was so excruciating I had to go to A&E. While I was there a nurse asked me all the usual questions, and then asked if there was a chance that I was pregnant. I said ‘no, but we are trying’ and then she asked how long we had been trying for. When I casually said ‘2 and a half years’ she gave me a surprised look which said it all without her speaking a word - and after further probing offered to refer me to the Gynae clinic.

I say all this to explain that seeking out help wasn’t even on my radar at that time – as far I was concerned, as a black woman I was going to fall pregnant naturally. And seeking help for pregnancy just isn’t something that is normalised in my community.

What our fertility investigations revealed was another lesson for me in unlearning all the misinformation I had around fertility. It turned out that we had male factor infertility because my husband had been a dialysis patient for over 10 years.

Again, at no point in my 2.5 years of denial and suffering in silence did I even consider that my husband’s medical situation could have had something to do with me not falling pregnant. As far as I was concerned, it was all my fault – his siblings all had children and I was the only non-Nigerian in the family, so it had to be me.

Our male factor diagnosis challenged everything I had believed around our fertility, and it’s been a process of deep-rooted unlearning for me since then – unlearning the misinformation, the biases, the patriarchal idea of the man as supreme (common in African cultures), unlearning the shame, unlearning my identity attachment to the ‘black women are hyper-fertile’ narrative.

In 2020 we started IVF, and we have had 3 failed embryo transfers so far. As if all the pre-IVF naïveté wasn’t enough, dealing with the emotions of fertility treatment and the grief of failed cycles has been like nothing I have ever experienced. It is so painful and so layered.

I was managing my hope and expectations then trying to pick myself up after the disappointment; another layer was managing the hope and expectations of my family members too, especially my mum who wants this just as much as I do.

There is also that continuous layer of grief that just lingers around during infertility; when you are at work, when you are out with friends, when you are in Tesco, or when you first wake up and have a cup of tea. It’s that constant feeling of ‘almost motherhood’, of being in limbo, neither fully here nor there.

A lot of us in the trying to conceive community identify ourselves as a ‘mama-in-waiting’. It’s an uncomfortable place to be – like being in a waiting room, but not knowing if your name will ever be called. This has been the hardest part for me; in my head-&-heart space I am already a mother, even though it hasn’t happened for me yet. And I ask myself all the time, how long can I continue to identify with an idea that doesn’t seem to be materialising? It’s a mind trip!

But not all is lost though, and after 5 years in this trying game I can honestly say I am a more authentic version of myself today. There is just something about this struggle that has made me care less about what people think, and has forced me to face myself and really make conscious decisions about who I want to be and how I want to move through the world.

I think that lessons on resilience from a fertility struggle manifest into other parts our lives too, because we are multi-dimensional beings. And the biggest lesson for me from my journey is that I am capable of feeling more than one thing – I know now that grief and joy can co-exists and that I can pick myself up from anything because I’ve done it multiple times in this journey. Even when it felt like the world would end. I’m still here and that matters. I matter.

I have discovered a deeper sense of self love – mind, body and soul - because I’m acutely aware that even though my body doesn’t just do what I want it to, all of me deserves love and kindness. I am not broken. I am a fierce, whole, multi-dimensional woman whose time has simply not come yet.

Hindsight is 2020, and there are many things I wish I had known before this journey began. I wish I had known how to communicate my needs better – whether to family, my husband, or even to myself.

I wish I had known that I am allowed to honour my feelings, especially the bad ones as they come, and then let them go when they are ready to leave.

I wish I had known that there were other Black/African women like me out there, going through infertility.

And I wish I had known all the medical options available to me – like the NHS entitlement I am fortunate to have, and sought counselling before we started IVF to help me manage the grief aspect of infertility.

The stigma and the silence around unconventional fertility journeys is literally costing women like me the better outcomes we deserve, and I feel passionately about this now. We need to be okay with the initial discomfort of creating dialogue around infertility so we can break the shame.

As author/researcher Brene Brown states: “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive”.

And when the shame is removed, EVERYTHING changes.

You can read more of Noni’s story at www.unfertility.com