… in that I’m not pregnant.

It shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise – who gets pregnant on their first round of IVF with one embryo? Well obviously some people do but not me. And while the logical part of my brain had committed to at least three, maybe more, cycles, there was a sliver of me thinking, “It could be me, I could be one of the lucky ones…”

And now, I’m going to sound like a complete dick, but I’m going to say it anyway. I don’t really know how to fail at stuff. I’ve passed every exam I’ve ever taken. I even passed my driving test first time around. And I can argue all I like that this one was out of my hands (and in a way that makes it even harder for me to deal with) but I didn’t pass this one first time round. And obviously, I’m going to pick myself up and go again — the first thing I did was email my consultant to say “OK, what do we do next?” — because I was never going to walk away after one go at it. IVF is hard. Arguably it’s even harder if you’re a control freak who doesn’t fail at stuff.

And what a bloody cliché I am. I’ve actually become one of those over-achieving women who think they can control everything in their lives and then run smack into the brick wall of their fertility and get a massive wake up call that er, actually this is something you can’t do anything about.

And bless my lovely friend C, who had her own struggles having her kids, who I think was the person who several years ago first said to me “I’ve never failed an exam in my life, I even passed my driving test first time.” Because this is what she said to me when I told her that it hadn’t worked:

“What I’m going to say next may not sound like consolation, because until you get to the place you want to be, it’s not much help. But really, this is the best lesson about parenthood there is. Because, you and me, chick, we’re grafters, in everything else in our lives, we put in a bit of extra effort, and we get the results that we want. This isn’t like that. And neither is parenting. Sometimes you can put in all the effort you want and it won’t make a blind bit of difference. You can’t always control stuff. And that’s ok.”

And so then, I started to think that maybe everything happens for a reason and that this was a lesson that I needed to learn. And that this was something that – if I do eventually become a parent – will make me a better parent than I might have been otherwise.