After Mark’s wife tragically died, his hope was that he could still have a family, and keep her dreams alive by using frozen embryos that they put on ice shortly before she began treatment for chemo. Now, if ever there was a cautionary tale for why you should have thorough conversations about the future/children/your hopes and wishes with your partner BEFORE you get married, this is it…
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments over the last year we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances! and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
When Tracy met Mark on Tinder she felt an immediate spark. They exchanged a few messages and then made a plan to meet up for a drink – it turned out they lived only a few minutes’ drive from one another.
On that date, Mark told her almost right away that there was something she should know – this was his first date in a very long time. He had been married, but his wife had died from breast cancer.
“Mark was 31,” says Tracy. “It seemed insane that he could be a widower so young.”
The two talked about his first wife, Anne, for quite some time. Mark told Tracy about how they met (they were 21), the travelling they did together, the diagnosis, the IVF they did to preserve her eggs and create embryos before she underwent chemo, and her death.
“When I told people about it they were kinda shocked that we ended up together,” says Tracy. “Y’know, like that whole thing about how you’re not supposed to talk about your ex on a first date? But somehow, it was nice and a really good date.”
Although, Tracy admits she was shocked when, at the end of the conversation about Anne, Mark told her when she had passed away.
“He was so okay talking about it, I thought it must have been a long time ago,” she says. “Then he said it was nine months ago!”
Tracy worried it was too fast, but Mark said he was ready to date again and she figured he seemed so pragmatic about it and able to talk freely about it, that it must be the case.
Despite the first date being so great, it took a while for the relationship to really get going – it was a slow burn. They were casually seeing each other, until Mark asked her if she was seeing anyone else and if they could be official. It’d been nine months since their first date.
After being together for eighteen months they moved in together, two weeks before Tracy’s 37th birthday. “We had this chat about our relationship and I said that I wanted kids at some point .I was five years older than Mark and wasn’t getting any younger – that maybe I’d missed the boat already and my eggs would be too old,” she says. “Mark said something like, ‘at least we have those embryos!’ and it took me aback a little bit but I kind of laughed along and said, ‘oh yeah, perfect’. Maybe it would be an option if for some reason I couldn’t have kids.”
Mark then proposed on her 37th birthday and they were married within the year.
“Looking back, what was quite odd was that we very rarely talked about Anne,” says Tracy. “I’d bring her up every now and then – or he would – but then he’d sort of shut down and not say anymore. The first night we met was the most he talked about Anne in all of our relationship.”
Tracy was going through a busy patch at work – and Mark was too – but things quietened down and they took a belated honeymoon. They hadn’t talked about children much – although they knew that the other wanted kids – but the topic soon came up on the honeymoon. Tracy floated the idea of them starting to try – she was now 38 and the clock felt like it was ticking.
But Mark had other ideas about what was supposed to happen next.
“When I said that he was like, ‘great, let’s book in with the IVF clinic and work out what’s next’,” says Tracy. “I was like, that’s confusing. Maybe you don’t know how it works, maybe I don’t, but I think you’re supposed to at least try to get pregnant first before going to and IVF clinic. It was like, I’m 38, not 308.”
Mark was under the impression, based on their previous discussions, that they’d be using his and Anne’s embryos to start a family.
“I was so shocked,” says Tracy. “I could only remember that one time him talking about us using them and it seemed like a joke? I assumed he meant it in the context of if I was worried I was infertile, that he had a back-up plan for us, not a Plan A!”
Tracy was further shocked by Mark’s reaction – he quickly began crying and saying that she was crushing not just his dreams but Anne’s dreams. He told her how – as she knew (which she says she most certainly didn’t), that Anne’s dream was to have children. He’d even recently told her parents that they would have Anne’s baby.
“I didn’t even know he still talked to her parents,” she says. “Now, it’s like, of course he would have. There’s so much I didn’t know about him and Anne and how much she was still part of his life.”
Tracy says it was a lot to take in, but, she loved Mark and she would have considered having their second child be using the embryos. “I wanted to talk to people about it and get my head around it though,” she says. “Like, what would that be like for that kid? For our family? I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t do harm to anyone. But that wasn’t even enough for Mark, he was like, I can’t wait around to see if that will happen because maybe it’s too late to even have one kid, let alone two.”
It was very intense and Tracy ended up booking a different hotel room for the next few nights of the honeymoon to get some time to think.
“The opposite of what you want on your honeymoon,” she says. “But my head was swimming.”
When they got home they had a few conversations about it, but they turned into quite heated arguments, or, he would lock himself away.
“I started to think that we had gotten married too quickly,” she says. “There was so much we didn’t know about each other and some of the basics of what we wanted from our lives.”
Tracy made the very difficult decision to leave the marriage. They had been married less than six months.
“It was the worst time,” she says. “I felt like, so guilty about Anne? I felt really sad for her and the embryos, but I also felt so angry myself that maybe I’d wasted my chance to have a baby now.”
In the year that followed, Tracy came to the realization that what she really did want was a baby, and it was up to her to make it happen. She told a few friends about this and then one day, one of her closest friends called her. He and his husband had talked about it at length and they wanted to help her. They had come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t have children, but they would like to help her and they would like to be cool uncles. Her friend offered to be a sperm donor.
So, with the help of ovulation tracking and a good old turkey baster technique, Tracy got pregnant on the third month of trying. She is just about to return to work after taking maternity leave.
“I’m so glad I didn’t give up on my dream,” she says. “It’s the best. Being a single mum is hard, but I have good support.”
She says one of the unexpected things that has happened was running into one of Mark’s friends when she was eight months pregnant. “He was really shocked that I was pregnant – he thought I couldn’t have children, which must be what Mark told all his friends was the reason why we split up,” she says.
Mark also called her after finding out her news. “I didn’t tell him because we haven’t kept in touch,” she says. “But he was really angry. He said that I was a hypocrite because it turned out I was fine using a donor. I was like, what? Me using a sperm donor is a lot different to a different egg?!”
Tracy says she hasn’t kept in touch with Mark, but a few of her friends are friends with him on social media and say he recently got engaged.
“All I want to say is, I hope they’ve had some convos about kids,” she says. “Like, proper ones, y’know?”
