TVNZ reporter Corazon Miller was still dreaming of meeting her soulmate and creating a conventional family when an unromantic trip to India served as a wakeup call: if she wanted to be a mother she had to do it alone, and quite quickly. It was a clear choice, she writes, but not an easy one.
India was to be my Eat, Pray, Love adventure. Packing my bag for a 2024 trip to the subcontinent, my head was full of dreams.
At 37, I was already a decade behind on my life goals – by my late 20s I was supposed to have found the love of my life, had children and established a successful career.
That last one was going fine. But while I had a fulfilling job as a TV journalist, with 40 rapidly approaching, I knew something needed to happen fast if I wanted the rest.
So, as I packed my bags to India, I allowed myself to dream.
Reality saw me land in India’s near 50-degree summer heat. I devoured many sights and scents as I travelled across northern India and into Nepal.
There was the Taj Mahal, the endangered Ganges River dolphins, Buddha’s birthplace of Lumbini – and accompanying me to these momentous, romantic sites was my assigned roomie Margie, a lovely septuagenarian from Tasmania. Hilarious and great company, but not quite who I'd had in mind.
Returning home, it was clear, my destiny was mine to shape. I needed to stop stalling and go ahead with Plan B – having a baby on my own.
I’m often asked, how did you decide?
“It just happened,” I say. And while this is mostly a joke, I do feel that the harder decision would have been to not have a child.
Destiny and dilemmas
In many ways I’d found it easier to imagine being a mother, than a wife. Growing up, friends who saw me cuddling yet another baby, would often joke that I’d be the first to have one.
Instead, I’m one of the last.
And while many didn’t question that I’d eventually try to have a baby, as I got older, I began to question myself. Was this what I really wanted? Was I just doing what society expected?
And even if this was what I wanted, was it fair to bring a child into a world where geopolitics, the economy and the climate are all red hot? Was it fair to raise a child, not just as a solo mother, but as the child of an immigrant mum, with the majority of our extended family in the Philippines?
There are no easy answers.
But as I hit 35, the age you're told your fertility starts to rapidly decline, I decided to at least get one question answered – how fertile was I?
Turns out there’s no simple answer there either. But I did find myself on the path that started as fertility preservation... and ended in motherhood three years later.
Science, specialists and a thrilling phone call
I froze my eggs in two rounds. Nine in total harvested. Good odds my fertility specialist said – though still no guarantee.
While meeting the perfect partner and father might have been my ideal, I was put on the donor wait list – “just in case,” the doctor said.
Just in case, soon became “more than likely” as, ultimately, I felt I could live with a version of myself with, or without, children – but I needed to know I’d at least tried.
That attempt, as anyone who has done IVF knows, was a rollercoaster of blood tests, hormone injections, medications, scans and attempts to create the optimal conditions to fertilise my eggs and create embryos viable for implantation.
In total it took me eight months, and two embryos to get pregnant. A thrilling call taken at work, where I learned it had worked, was quickly followed by trepidation. It couldn’t be this easy, could it?
Every week, I held back the fear that perhaps something was wrong.
But as my baby grew, so did my excitement at getting to meet them. With it was some sadness that there wasn’t a significant other navigating this journey with me.
Aside from the mental fatigue of being the sole decision maker – the biggest challenge was putting flat-pack furniture together solo while seven months pregnant, and gathering a rota of local friends who could drive us to the hospital when the time came.
From news hound to mother
As that time neared, I also worried, would I miss who I was before I had baby? As it was, when my waters broke scarily early, at just 31 weeks, and I was admitted to hospital, I found it difficult to let go of work. Between visitors and tests I could be seen frantically tapping at my keyboard.
“Baby needs to stay in, story needs to come out,” I joked. I even filmed my last piece-to-camera across from the hospital in the Auckland Domain and voiced my last 6pm news story from a car parked outside the hospital's front doors.
Fortunately, baby stayed in for another month. And my fears about adapting to my new role dissipated as I snuggled my little 2.8 kilo bundle – a surprise baby boy born a month early on November 13.
I was lucky, Eiden’s a placid baby. And while I was new to motherhood, I’d worked as a neonatal intensive care nurse, which meant the learning curve of those early weeks wasn't quite as steep for me as it must be for some .
I’m also lucky to have my mother, who dotes on Eiden as much as I do. And I’ve found myself surrounded by a village of friends, old and new, who supported me in those early weeks with visits and gifts and shared experiences of motherhood.
And now, having had said baby earthside for as many months as it took for him to grow, I’ve found it surprisingly easy to live in the moment and just enjoy this time for what it is.
My favourite thing is how his smile lights up his whole face and his full-body laugh. He can sit and has started to crawl. He loves music and audio books and watching The Chase with his grandma (the only TV I’ve allowed – at least it’s general knowledge?)
Never too soon for a baby's first OE
I haven’t “achieved” as much as I’d hoped; his baby journal is still a work in progress, photos are still in a “to-print” file in my phone, home renovations have taken longer than intended, organising a trip to the Philippines for his first birthday remains on the to-do-list, efforts to get back to my pre-natal form are ongoing, and while I have managed to make my dream trip to Europe a reality, with baby in tow, I flew with a week’s notice and have been booking accommodation on the hop, sometimes as late as the morning of.
But as I watch Eiden grow, much faster than I’m ready for, I feel at ease knowing my main role for now is to be his mum, even if that means some of the nice-to-haves on my wish lists drop off.
And soon – sooner than I’d like – the endless hours of sleepy snuggles will end and I’ll face a new reality of navigating life as a solo working mum.
As I look ahead to the challenges the future may bring, I do at times still wonder if it was the right decision. Not because I have regrets, but because I still worry what he will think one day, and what he may face because of the choices I made.
But then I remind myself that all I can do is make him feel loved, supported and strong enough to face his future. And that’s no different from any other mother and child.
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