A letter to my past self about having a first IVF baby

I'm currently staring at a giant red plastic sharps container sitting entirely too close to my half-empty, ice-cold mug of coffee on the bathroom counter. It’s six months ago, and my best friend Rachel is sobbing on the phone because her embryo transfer finally, actually worked. She is pregnant with her first IVF baby. She is terrified. And as I’m trying to talk her off the ledge of her own anxiety, I realize I'm saying exactly the things I wish someone had grabbed my shoulders and screamed into my face seven and a half years ago when I was pregnant with Maya.

So, consider this a letter to you, or to Rachel, or honestly, a letter to my past self. Because when you finally get that positive test after years of negative ones, after the bruising and the invasive wands and the absolute financial hell of it all, you don't instantly feel happy. You feel like you're carrying a priceless, fragile fabergé egg and if you sneeze too hard, the universe is going to take it away.

The clinic graduation is actually terrifying

Nobody warns you about the absolute mind-trip that's graduating from your fertility clinic. For weeks—months, even—you're treated like a very expensive science experiment. They draw your blood every three minutes. You get ultrasounds constantly. You know your exact estrogen and progesterone levels. You have a whole team of nurses who know your voice on the phone. And then, at like eight or ten weeks, they give you a little goodie bag, tell you congratulations, and send you to a regular OB-GYN.

And the regular OB-GYN is just like... see you in four weeks! Have a nice month!

I remember sitting in my car in the clinic parking lot, wearing these horrible grey sweatpants that were stained with God knows what, completely panicking. Like, what do you mean I just walk around in the world for a whole month without anyone checking to make sure there's still a heartbeat? My husband, Mark, who processes anxiety by researching car seat crash test ratings, kept trying to tell me this was a good thing. That it meant we were normal now. But I didn't feel normal. I felt like I was faking it. Like I had snuck into the "regular pregnant people" club and eventually security was going to tap me on the shoulder and kick me out.

We painted the nursery beige eventually and bought a crib, but honestly whatever.

What Dr. Miller said about the science stuff

When you go through assisted reproduction, you end up knowing way too much medical trivia that you've zero qualifications to interpret. I spent hours—literally hours—in late-night Reddit spirals reading about how babies conceived through IVF are supposedly different.

I read somewhere—or maybe I hallucinated it while hopped up on pregnancy hormones—that frozen embryo babies are sometimes born slightly larger than average? Or maybe it was fresh transfers that are smaller? I don't even know anymore. I went into my doctor's office with a literal notepad of insane questions. Dr. Miller, who's a saint but always looks like he desperately needs a nap, just kind of blinked at me over his glasses. He basically said that once they're out in the world, they're just babies. They grow the same. They poop the same. They scream at 3 AM the exact same way.

The only thing I vaguely remember him explaining was something about ICSI—the thing where they inject the sperm directly into the egg because Mark’s swimmers were, well, unenthusiastic. Apparently, if you've a boy via ICSI, they might inherit the same slow swimmers later in life? I honestly zoned out halfway through because Maya is a girl and also I was just so exhausted from overthinking every single cellular division.

Why we obsess over every single chemical

Here's a deeply annoying truth about becoming a parent after infertility: you become completely psychotic about what touches your baby. You've just spent a small fortune—like, literal down-payment-on-a-house money—and pumped your body full of synthetic hormones to get this kid here. The idea of putting them in cheap polyester or exposing them to weird plastic toxins feels like a personal failure.

I became a total nightmare about this. If a relative brought over something neon and plastic that smelled like a chemical factory, I'd smile, say thank you, and immediately hide it in the trunk of my car. I wanted everything to be pure. We basically lived in the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao. It’s 95% organic cotton, undyed, and doesn't have any of those weird synthetic chemical treatments. Maya's newborn skin was so incredibly sensitive, and she would get these little red patches if I put her in anything else. I loved that it was stretchy enough to get over her giant, wobbly newborn head without me feeling like I was going to break her, which was my constant, overriding fear.

Things my husband bought that were just fine

Because I was spiraling about organic cotton, Mark decided his coping mechanism would be aesthetic wooden toys. He read some blog about European parenting and suddenly decided our house needed to look like a minimalist woodland retreat.

He ordered this Wooden Animals Play Gym Set with Elephant & Bird. Look, it’s objectively gorgeous. It’s carved from sustainable hardwood, has zero plastic, and the little wooden A-frame made our living room look like a chic Scandinavian daycare. But if I'm being brutally honest with you? Maya looked at the wooden bird for exactly five seconds, gave it a look of mild disgust, and went back to chewing on a spit-up rag. She just didn't care. It looked amazing in all my desperate "look, I'm a real mom!" Instagram photos, though. Anyway, the point is, you don't have to stress if they don't appreciate the beautiful, sustainable heirloom pieces right away. They're basically angry potatoes for the first three months.

If you're currently stress-scrolling at 2 AM trying to figure out what you actually need to buy, you can explore the Kianao organic baby clothes and blankets collections—just, like, pace yourself and maybe drink some water.

The weird guilt of complaining

Nobody talks about the guilt. Oh god, the guilt is heavy. When you've an IVF baby, you feel like you're never, ever allowed to complain. You spent years crying in bathrooms at other people's baby showers. You prayed for this. You begged the universe for this.

So when you're throwing up your entire soul into a trash can at 8 weeks pregnant, you force yourself to smile and say, "I'm just so grateful!" When the baby finally arrives and you haven't slept in 72 hours and your nipples are bleeding and you're crying into your cold coffee, a tiny voice in your head says, You asked for this. You paid for this. You don't get to be miserable.

It's crap. Total crap. Being grateful that science works doesn't mean you've to enjoy teething. By the time Leo came along three years later, I was way more chill, but with Maya, every milestone felt so loaded.

When her first teeth started coming in, she turned into an absolute feral beast. I felt so guilty for being annoyed by her constant shrieking. I ended up getting the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy because I was still in my non-toxic era, but honestly, it saved my sanity. It's food-grade silicone, completely BPA-free, and most importantly, you can just chuck it in the dishwasher. The dishwasher became my most intimate relationship during that first year. She would gnaw on that little panda's ears for hours, and I'd sit on the couch and just try to forgive myself for finding motherhood exhausting.

Figuring out how to tell them later

Maya is seven now, which is wild to think about. We always knew we wanted to be honest with her about how she was conceived, mostly because I never wanted it to feel like a dirty secret. But trying to explain reproductive endocrinology to a toddler is... weird.

Mark and I totally overthought it. We bought these books with little cartoon test tubes and embryos. But when she was about four, she asked why she didn't have a baby sister yet, and I just sort of blurted out, "Well, Mom and Dad needed a special doctor's help to get you here, and it took a really long time to put our tiny pieces together."

She just looked at me, blinked, said "Okay," and asked for a snack. Literally. That was it. I had been sweating over this conversation for years, and she cared more about getting a handful of Goldfish crackers. Kids are amazingly literal and resilient. They don't have our baggage unless we hand it to them.

If you're in the thick of it right now—whether you're holding a positive test, sitting in an OB waiting room feeling like an imposter, or rocking a tiny baby that science and pure stubbornness built—just know that the anxiety does fade. Eventually, the medical trauma blurs, the clinic visits feel like a lifetime ago, and you're just... a parent. A very tired, coffee-dependent parent.

Before you spiral into another late-night Google panic about milestones or chemical off-gassing in mattresses, go check out Kianao’s organic essentials. Buy yourself one soft, beautiful thing that makes you feel peaceful, and then close your laptop and go to sleep.

The messy questions we all secretly Google

Are babies from IVF usually smaller or something?

I swear I read a hundred contradictory studies about this. Some say fresh transfers are smaller, frozen transfers are bigger, but my doctor basically laughed and said it doesn't matter. Maya was seven pounds and perfectly average. Honestly, the science changes every five minutes, but long-term, they catch up to whatever genetics you and your partner gave them. Don't stress about the birth weight unless your actual doctor tells you to.

Do I really need to buy organic everything just because of IVF?

Need to? No. Will you probably want to? Yes. When you've gone through the wringer of fertility treatments, you become hyper-aware of your environment. I couldn't control my failing ovaries, but I could control what fabric touched my kid's skin. Getting organic cotton just gave my anxious brain one less thing to worry about. Pick your battles—clothes and teethers were my priority, but if they lick a plastic chair at a restaurant later, they'll survive.

Why do I feel so disconnected from my pregnancy?

Because trauma is real! You spent months or years training your brain to expect bad news. Every ultrasound was a potential disaster. It's completely normal if your brain is refusing to bond with the pregnancy right away as a defense mechanism. I didn't let myself honestly believe Maya was real until they handed her to me. Give yourself some grace. The bond comes.

When should I tell my kid they were an IVF baby?

Mark and I started using the words "doctor's help" and "science" when Maya was tiny, just so the vocabulary was always normal in our house. Child psychologists say to keep it simple when they're little and add the actual biology details when they're older. Just don't make it a dramatic sit-down reveal when they're a teenager. Let it just be part of their boring family lore.

Is it normal to hate the newborn stage after trying so hard?

Yes. A million times yes. You're allowed to be profoundly grateful for your child and simultaneously hate running on two hours of sleep with cracked nipples. Infertility doesn't owe the universe a debt of toxic positivity. You're a regular parent now, which means you get to complain about the hard stuff just like everybody else.