The long road to shared motherhood
My name is Steph and my wife is Manny. We were married at Worthing Baptist Church last year and have been part of the church since 2021.
I remember sitting with my rugby team in the pub a few years ago and the question was asked 'what is your biggest dream to achieve in your life?'. There were answers of 'climb Kilimanjaro', 'visit the Great Barrier Reef', 'do an Iron Man', but before I knew it, I'd said 'be a mum'.
We saved for 5 years, alongside paying for a wedding and buying a house. We skipped going out, instead getting dressed up at home and pretending our living room was a cosy pub. We skipped holidays and a fancy honeymoon and put every spare penny into our savings.
Money made the journey to parenthood so challenging for us. We had to wait until we had the money, not until we were ready to be parents. It's been 10 years since I've felt ready to be a mum. I found that every time I found out that someone had been blessed with a pregnancy, that I felt deeply unhappy. When my close friend got pregnant after the first time trying with her husband, instead of feeling happy for her, I felt anger, jealousy, injustice and most of all guilt that I felt like this. I would see people getting pregnant with their second or third child and couldn't help feeling how unfair it was, that they could have this, and I couldn’t even afford one child yet.
I spent hours speaking with God, praying he'd take away all this negativity from me. Instead, he softened my heart. He taught me that it wasn't me wishing my friends couldn't have what I wanted. He was teaching me to be gentle with my heart and to understand why I cared so much. He wanted me to allow myself to feel things, because he knew just how much I wanted to be a mum.
This year, we were finally ready to get started with our IVF journey. We chose 'Shared Motherhood', a method where one mother carries the other mother's embryos. My wife was a hero and produced 35 eggs, of which 21 were successfully fertilised and 14 were of top quality to be used and frozen for the future.
I knew God's hand was in our journey at the clinic. From our nurse having the same surname as my late grandmother (who was so important to me), to the doctor's name being the same as my childhood teddy, which had always brought me so much comfort.
We were so lucky that 9 days after our embryo transfer, we got our first positive pregnancy test- our embryo had stayed. Of course, with a baby the size of a poppy seed, we knew our situation was fragile.
At 6 weeks pregnant, I woke up to a haemorrhage. We were told that day by multiple professionals that we had lost the baby. We couldn't believe the grief it was possible to feel for something so small and so young. My wife stayed hopeful and wouldn't believe the baby had gone. She was right to be hopeful, I had in fact had a Subchorionic Haemorrhage and the baby had somehow survived. Pregnancy, although it's all I have ever wanted, has continued to humble me daily- but that is a story for another day!
I'll end with a quote from our favourite book to read to my tummy. The real recipe to make a baby.
'A dash of determination
A superstar egg
Three heaped spoonfuls of courage
A fast wiggly sperm
A galaxy of hope
Brave hearts
A mountain of patience
A rainbow of support
A scoop of sleepy nights'
Baby Kwan coming February 2026!
(Quote is from Made With Love: A Story of Two Mums and a Little Magic by Sophie Barton)
