What can you do if you can't have children, but desperately want a family? Mariella Frostrup advises a woman struggling to find a partner who will accept her fertility problems
THE DILEMMA I went through premature menopause at the age of 24. I've spent the past eight years working hard trying not to let this destroy me, working full-time while completing a further degree. Now I'm about to embark on a career change which will involve moving to another country. While I feel excited, I know that all I want is a family. I recently broke up with someone who wasn't able to cope when I told him my options for children are adoption or egg donation. I'm at a loss. How do I meet someone who will want to have a family with me?
It's a mad world isn't it? Here you are breaking up with a man because he wants babies while my postbag is stuffed with your contemporaries broken-hearted because their partners don't want to procreate! You just can't win and along the way you learn to stop trying.
Nowadays I see fate as a familiar adversary who keeps me on my toes. The truth is we all have our "crosses to bear", as the nuns used to insist between canings. It could be argued that life isn't what you make of it, it's what you make of what it throws at you. There's no point in my outlining your advantages when what you feel most acutely is this one terrible loss.
Your greatest ambition is to have a family and that comes as no surprise. We thrive on making our toughest goals the important ones and forgetting the smaller triumphs. You are lucky to live in an era when science has made having a child achievable. As you say egg donation is one option ? and one that didn't exist 30 years ago ? adoption is another. You just need to work out how best you'd like to negotiate the process.
Having recently read Jackie Kay's brilliant Red Dust Road, adoption has been much on my mind of late. Her description of being a mixed-race child in a white Scottish Marxist home offers a compelling argument for opening our homes to similarly abandoned children. For the past 20 years such blending of colour and culture has been frowned upon and children were considered better off in orphanages than in a culturally "alien" but loving home environment. Thankfully that obstacle has now been removed and in her homage to nurture not nature Kay makes a strong case for the benefits to all concerned of looking beyond our own biology for children to raise.
These days families come in all shapes, sizes and sexualities so you will be joining a vast, exuberant congregation no matter what way you choose to make up your domestic unit. There's another choice that you don't mention but which many others have opted for ? to live a rich, varied, ambitious existence surrounded by friends and unfettered by other responsibilities. Kids are not the only way of enjoying a full life. To be fair to you, with your present job plans and move, you sound like you are already making the most of life. One option surely would be to continue in that vein and see what the fates throw at you next.
Those I know who have remained childless are frequently the focus of mine and others' envy, travelling as and when they feel the urge, free to tackle careers and challenges that once you become a parent are unthinkable until your chicks have flown the nest. You say you don't have options, but I'd say you have plenty. To bring up a child with a partner you need a strong commitment to each other that transcends life's multifarious challenges. The boyfriend you split with who couldn't "cope" with the routes to parenthood you were considering would have been unlikely to make the grade. Advance terms and conditions don't work when it comes to matters of the heart and commitment has to be to the big picture, to dealing with the details as they present themselves.
Your part of the bargain must be to ensure you don't use fertility issues as an excuse for why relationships fail. In some cases it may be nothing at all to do with future parenting complications, but it's actually the humdrum issues faced by all in our struggles to maintain romantic unions. The pressure you will create if you make fertility your focus will make long-term unions harder to sustain.
Make the most of the life you are leading. You'll meet someone happy to embark on an alternative route to parenting, but to achieve that you must avoid focusing on this to the detriment of other aspects of your relationship. What will be will be, whereas battling forever against the odds will just be exhausting.
If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. To have your say on this week's column, go to guardian.co.uk/dearmariella
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/17/menopause-women
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