My name is Kelli R., and I am from San Francisco, California, USA. I always knew in my bones that becoming a mom was the most important thing to me. I just never imagined how hard the road there would be.
It started in 2021 when we were diagnosed with unexplained infertility. That word — unexplained — is one of the hardest things to sit with. Because there is nothing to point to. Nothing to fix. Just a question that hangs in the air with no answer. We tried three IUIs first. None of them worked. And then we started IVF.
We did four rounds. Four. And every single time, something would stop happening around day three. The embryos would just arrest — they never made it past that point. I lost four embryos across two transfers. We did every test imaginable. We worked with embryologists and some of the best doctors in this field. Nobody could tell us why. And that silence was its own kind of heartbreak.
By the fourth round we tried something different — splitting the fertilization between my husband’s sperm and a donor’s, just to see if there was any difference in how the embryos developed. There wasn’t. The results were identical. Which told us clearly that this was about my eggs. And still — no one could explain why.
I was also dealing with PCOS, stage one endometriosis, a cyst in my uterus and a completely blocked left fallopian tube. In October 2022 I had surgery to address what we could. And somewhere in the middle of all of it my husband and I had the most important conversation of our lives — we were done with IVF using our own gametes. It was time to find another way to become parents.
Our clinic had a donor egg bank and we found a donor whose profile felt right. And then came the next question — would my husband use his own sperm or would we use a donor for that as well? Early on in our journey he had shown some DNA fragmentation and we did not want to take any chances. But there was something else too — something that felt quietly important to both of us. We wanted to walk this road the same way. To both be donor parents together. To share that experience equally. So we chose donor sperm as well. And honestly that decision felt like the most us thing we had ever done.
In January 2023 we did our first transfer with donor embryos. And it worked. For the very first time in my entire life I was pregnant — and it stayed. My son was born healthy and perfect. Our second donor transfer brought our daughter. Two transfers. Two live births. I am two for two and some days I still cannot believe it. If things had gone differently I would not have my children. I would not trade my diagnosis for anything in the world because it led me exactly to them.
What surprised me most through all of this was simply having to go through it at all. I was completely unprepared for how complex and how invisible infertility is. The treatments do not pause your life. You still go to work every day. You still function. You still show up — while carrying something enormous and private that most people around you have no idea about. That is one of the loneliest parts. Needing grace from people who do not know enough to give it.
But what I kept coming back to — the thing that got me through — was resilience. That is it. That is the whole secret. There is no shortcut. No magic answer. Just getting up every single day and moving forward anyway. And I did. Over and over again.
My husband was there every step of the way. My parents and friends showed up in the ways they could. And then I found the RESOLVE San Francisco group — and something shifted in me. Finding people who truly understood what this felt like from the inside changed everything. For about a year I stepped in as a leader of that group. I have sat with women in the middle of their hardest moments. I have walked alongside them. That has been one of the greatest privileges of my entire life.
If you are reading this and you are somewhere in the middle of your own journey please hear this — you do not have to do this alone. You should not do this alone. Whether you want to quietly observe or share every single detail find your community. Be in the space. Know that you are not alone because you are so far from it.
And to the moms who are already there and still wondering if they are doing enough — your children have no point of reference. You are all they know. Just do your best. Block out the noise. And give yourself all the grace you would give your best friend.
With so much love and gratitude for this wild, hard, beautiful journey, Kelli
@Kelli, thank you for giving us a glimpse into your story — because it shows us that our children do not always come to us the way we planned, but they always come to us exactly the way they were meant to.
