S5-E29 - Brooke & Mia

The wake up call

Brooke spent most of her 30s in a relationship with a man who already had a child and didn't want more. She told herself she was okay with that. She spent 10 years telling herself that. And somewhere in those 10 years, quietly, she started filling out IVF paperwork in the background.

She never did anything with it. COVID arrived. She went back to it in 2021. She saw a counsellor, got on the donor waitlist at Melbourne IVF, found the Facebook sperm donation groups deeply uncomfortable, met a recruited donor and drove home knowing that wasn't right either. And then her brother had a brain aneurysm. He survived. But she was 42, and she looked at him and thought: I have one shot at life, and I am going to regret this forever if I don't try.

She was 43 when she finally had her egg collection — 11 eggs retrieved, 7 viable embryos — numbers that will give every woman in her 40s something to hold onto. She did not take any special vitamins. She was, in her own words, very much "if it's meant to be."

Three transfers. The first didn't work. The second — which she didn't tell anyone she was doing — didn't work either. A reading over Christmas that gave her hope, then didn't. A D&C to prepare the lining, and then a fourth transfer she barely planned for, fitted in between a work secondment in regional Victoria and a visit back to Melbourne.

She didn't tell anyone she was doing that one either.

It worked.

Mia was born in November, 10 days after Brooke's 44th birthday. During the pregnancy, Brooke found out her dad had stage 4 lung cancer. He made it to meet Mia. He got to see her smile. He passed away when Mia was four months old. Brooke has a photo of the two of them smiling at each other.

In the months after Mia arrived, Brooke experienced postnatal depression — triggered by a sleep school programme that went against every instinct she had. She recognised it quickly, got onto a helpline that night, and got help fast. She talks about it openly because she wants other women to know it doesn't mean you're a bad mum, and it doesn't mean you made the wrong decision.

Mia is almost two. Her name means "mine" in Italian — chosen because Brooke's nonna is Italian, and the donor's family is too. She co-sleeps most nights, wakes three or four times, and is a very determined, very independent little girl who drags a vintage Cabbage Patch doll around the house.

There are three embryos still in the freezer. Brooke is thinking about them every day.

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