Reading the Score

At the end of the day, an isolating experience like IVF needs to be witnessed. Even when it goes well. You need people who see you to see that experience. It can be a hard ask when the outcome of the experience is a loved and cherished child. How do you talk about the regret and trauma without somehow tainting your motherhood experience by association? I don’t have an answer, but I am almost certain that not talking about it isn’t it. So it’s important to hear these stories. To witness. … Read More Reading the Score

August 13, 2023 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

On What I did not Expect

I don’t know quite what I expected. For the longest time (and I know how lucky we are that for us, that only meant months, not years), we’d been planning for this pregnancy, working as hard as we could emotionally to conceive our miracle, fighting the despair that threatened to overwhelm anything positive about… Read More On What I did not Expect

October 11, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema Görgens2 Comments

Writing against the silence

I have a very happy, complicated relationship with writing. It is at once very personal, in the ways that only the places you can call home are, and very public, in the way that professional ambition can be. Writing has always been a place for me to take the pieces of my life, sorrowful… Read More Writing against the silence

June 9, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

The ‘I’ Word

There’s a word I’ve been religiously avoiding using in all my conversations, and writing about this experience, and the word is this: infertility. I avoid it partly because our doctor is yet to use it to refer to either of us (medically, officially, you are only allowed to assign it after a couple have… Read More The ‘I’ Word

June 7, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

On mourning Maya Angelou, Ursula Le Guin and Failure

Last week was incredibly hard. Dr Maya Angelou died. I suppose I knew it was coming. And to be honest, it wasn’t a death I thought of with great dread, as I did whenever I contemplated President Nelson Mandela dying. Maya Angelou’s work and her story meant a great deal to me, but I didn’t expect… Read More On mourning Maya Angelou, Ursula Le Guin and Failure

June 2, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

Myth Busting the Baby Dreaming

Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that there will be absolutely no zen-ning this out. All of the wisdom, all of the stuff I’m reading, all the message boards I’m on, all the conversations with our doctors – I mean every thing – tells us to just relax. Rome wasn’t built in… Read More Myth Busting the Baby Dreaming

May 22, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

Pre-baby Body

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love” Leonard Cohen I’ve been trying to figure out when to write about this. After all the treatments and poking and prodding is done, and the losses have been endured, and we have what we want –… Read More Pre-baby Body

April 27, 2014October 24, 2024 Rumbi Goredema GörgensLeave a comment

Rumbi Writes

Missives and Musings from the Middle of the Margins

Tag: fertility