In her own words

Infertility made me fluent in pretending I was fine.

So when the pregnancy test finally showed two lines, I did not scream. I sat on the bathroom floor with the test in my hand and whispered, “Please stay.” That was my first prayer as a pregnant woman. Not thank you. Not finally. Please stay.

Pregnancy after infertility is strange because everyone thinks the pain ends at the positive test. Mine did not. I loved the tiny life inside me fiercely, but I was scared to buy clothes, scared to tell people, scared to imagine a baby in my arms. At every scan I watched the sonographer’s face before I looked at the screen.

Slowly, my joy learned to breathe. A friend told me I did not have to choose between gratitude and fear; both could sit in the same room. By the seventh month I bought a yellow blanket. By the eighth, I let my mother ululate. By the ninth, I finally said, out loud, “I am going to be someone’s mother.”

To the woman pregnant after years of waiting: you are not ungrateful because you are afraid. You are a woman who has been through a lot, learning to trust good news again. Take the joy in small sips. It is still yours.

We grew apart. Clean sentences, carefully ironed, hiding the truth that I had spent years disappearing in my own home.

There was no dramatic final scene. No slammed door. Just a Tuesday when I stood in the kitchen, washing one plate, and realised I had not laughed freely in months. I remember the water running over my hands and the thought arriving quietly: this cannot be the whole of my life.

The hardest part was not leaving. The hardest part was surviving other people’s disappointment. The aunties who asked what I had done wrong. The friends who told me to pray harder. The small shame of changing my emergency contact. Divorce came with paperwork, yes, but also with a grief nobody had prepared me for: the grief of the future I had once defended.

Then one morning I woke up in a flat that was too quiet and made tea exactly the way I liked it. I opened the curtains. I paid the electricity. I ate toast in bed. Nothing about that morning was glamorous, but it was mine. My life had not ended. It had returned to me.

I no longer call my divorce a failure. I call it a border. On one side, a woman who kept shrinking to keep peace. On the other, a woman learning that peace must include her too.

A missing chair at parents’ evening. They are not completely wrong; there are absences. But there is also a fullness they do not always see.

My daughter was two when it became just the two of us. I was terrified of bedtime, school fees, fevers, December holidays, everything. I used to stand in the grocery aisle doing maths in my head, choosing between fruit and washing powder, while she sang to herself in the trolley.

The first year humbled me. I learned which neighbours could be trusted with a spare key. I learned to ask for help without apologising for needing it. I learned that a home can be small and still feel safe. Some nights I cried after she slept, not because I regretted her, but because carrying love alone can still be heavy.

But my daughter has never known our family as broken. She knows pancakes on Saturdays, school shoes polished on Sunday nights, prayers before tests, dancing while we clean. She knows that her mother shows up. Imperfectly, sometimes late, sometimes tired, but there.

Single motherhood is not a slogan. It is lunchboxes, rent, courage, fatigue, laughter, and the miracle of making a child feel held while you are still learning to hold yourself.

I still think about that smile.

For years, I tried to lead in a way that would not make anyone uncomfortable. I softened my emails. I turned instructions into suggestions. I laughed at jokes I did not find funny because I wanted the room to stay easy. The room stayed easy for everyone except me.

The change came after a junior woman pulled me aside and said, “When you speak, I feel braver.” I realised then that my shrinking was not private. Other women were watching, measuring what was possible by how much space I allowed myself to take.

So I stopped over-explaining. I prepared well, spoke clearly, and let silence do its work after I finished a sentence. Some people called it confidence. It felt more like honesty. I was not there to decorate the room. I was there to build something.

Leadership in a male-dominated industry has taught me this: you do not have to become hard to be taken seriously. You can be warm, exact, ambitious, kind and immovable. The door opens differently when you stop asking the room whether you belong.

The day I left was not the worst day. That surprises people. The worst days had already happened quietly, behind curtains, inside sentences no one else heard. The day I left, I packed two bags and took my documents. My hands shook so badly I could not close the zip.

Safety did not feel like freedom at first. It felt like noise in my chest. I slept with the light on. I checked locks three times. I flinched when a car slowed outside. Healing was not a straight road; it was learning that calm did not have to be followed by punishment.

A counsellor helped me stop asking why I had not left sooner and start asking what helped me survive long enough to leave at all. That question changed something. It gave dignity back to the woman I had been. She was not foolish. She was finding a way through.

I am still becoming soft again. I laugh more easily now. I buy flowers for the kitchen. I answer my phone without fear. Survival is not only escape; it is the slow return of your own voice in your own home.

I also felt as though I was sinking.

The first weeks were a blur of feeding, bleeding, visitors and advice. Everyone said I should sleep when the baby slept, but my mind would not switch off. I watched her breathe. I watched the door. I watched myself from far away, like a woman in a photograph I did not recognise.

Shame kept me quiet. I thought good mothers were grateful, glowing, patient. I was anxious, tearful and frightened by ordinary tasks. One afternoon I stood beside the cot and realised I had been crying without sound. That scared me enough to tell my clinic nurse the truth.

She did not look shocked. She asked questions. She helped me make a plan. Therapy, medication, my sister sleeping over twice a week, fewer visitors, more honesty. Recovery was not instant, but it was real. One day I noticed I was singing to my baby without forcing myself to.

If motherhood has arrived with a shadow for you, please tell someone safe. You are not a bad mother. You are a mother who needs care too. The baby matters. So do you.

Starting over is full of moments no one warns you about.

People wanted me to be either devastated or triumphant. I was both, depending on the hour. Some mornings I felt light enough to run errands with lipstick on. Some evenings I ate cereal for supper and missed the version of us that had existed only in my hopes.

What helped was refusing to turn healing into another performance. I did not redecorate my whole life in a weekend. I bought one lamp. I invited one friend. I cooked one proper meal. I learned the sound of my own home when no one was angry in it.

There is a special tenderness in becoming familiar with yourself again. I remembered that I liked music in the morning. I remembered that I was funny. I remembered that my dreams had not been buried with my marriage certificate.

Starting over did not make me new. It returned me to myself, older and wiser, with fewer illusions and more mercy. That is enough. Some days, it is everything.

So I carried it — through matric exams written on painkillers, through university, through the first years of a career where I kept a hot water bottle hidden under my desk.

The word that changed everything was spoken almost casually, by a locum doctor I had never met before and have never seen since. She looked at my file, then at me, and said: “Has anyone ever investigated you for endometriosis?” No one had. Twelve years of appointments, and no one had.

Diagnosis wasn't a happy ending — it was a beginning. Surgery, medication decisions, learning what my body needed instead of what I demanded from it. But the deepest change was in my own voice. I stopped saying “it's probably nothing”. I started keeping notes, asking for referrals, bringing questions written down so pain couldn't scatter them.

To the woman reading this on the bathroom floor at work, breathing through a wave of it: you are not weak, you are not dramatic, and you are not alone. Pain is information. Find someone who will read it with you.

The visitors came with gifts and left with photographs. Everyone asked about the baby. His weight, his sleep, his feeding. Nobody asked about me, and I learned to volunteer nothing. Inside, a grey fog was thickening. I loved my son with a fierceness that frightened me, and yet I felt nothing when I looked at my own face in the mirror. I remember thinking: I have gone missing, and no one has noticed.

It was a nurse at his three-month check who noticed. She asked the questions on her form, then put the form down and asked them again with her eyes. I cried for the first time in twelve weeks. She did not flinch. She said: “This is common. It is treatable. It is not your fault.” Three sentences. I still know them by heart.

Therapy helped. Medication helped. My sister moving in for a month helped. Slowly, the woman in the mirror came back — changed, softer in some places and harder in others. My son is three now. When I visit new mothers, I hold the baby second. First, I look at her, and I ask: “And how are you — really?”

I went home and grieved children I had not even decided I wanted.

For years, PCOS was the lens over everything. Every skipped period was a verdict. Every unwanted hair was an accusation. Diet after diet promised to fix me, and every one of them broke something else instead — mostly my relationship with mirrors and with food.

The turning point was not a treatment. It was an endocrinologist who began our first appointment with: “Tell me what you understand about your condition,” and then gently, over an hour, replaced my fears with mechanisms. Insulin. Androgens. Ovulation. Things that could be measured, influenced, managed. She was the first person to tell me that most women with PCOS have families, if and when they choose to.

I am thirty-one now. My cycles are regular-ish, my blood work is good, and whether I have children remains my decision, not my diagnosis's. PCOS is a chapter in my story — a long one, honestly — but I hold the pen.

I broke it, loudly and a little ridiculously, by joining a running club. I could not run four hundred metres. I was hot-flushing, sleeping badly, and carrying a body that felt suddenly unfamiliar. The younger women were kind; the two other women my age were revelatory. We named everything, out loud, between breaths. Night sweats. Brain fog. The strange grief of it, and the strange freedom too.

I learned to lift weights because a physiotherapist in the club insisted bones my age needed it. I learned about hormone therapy from an actual doctor instead of a decades-old rumour, and made my own informed choice. I learned that my finishing pace matters less than the fact of my feet still striking the ground.

The half marathon took me two hours and fifty-one minutes. My periods ended somewhere in week six of training, quietly, without ceremony. I crossed both finish lines the same way: sweating, laughing, surrounded by women, and utterly unashamed. This season of life is not a diminishment. It is a distance event, and I intend to run all of it.