Jo’s story

Jo Jackson is a Police Detective and a specialist in grief and trauma support, as well as a secondary infertility survivor, and an adoptive and birth mum.

I am a mum of two. I have a birth child, my daughter who is 12 years old, and also an adoptive son who is 8 and can be quite challenging, but I love the bones of them both!

My own infertility story was unexpected as I had my first child really easily. I was in my mid 30s but I got pregnant straight away, and didn’t have any problems at all. But when my daughter was around 2-3 we started thinking that it was time to try again, and this is when I began to experience secondary infertility.

When we didn’t get pregnant right away again, I tried all the obvious things to do – like ovulation test kits, and healthy eating, and tracking things really carefully. But nothing seemed to help at all. I just couldn’t get pregnant again, not matter what I did. I just remember it being a really hard, emotional and stressful time, and I really feel for anyone who is facing this challenge right now.

Then eventually, after a couple of years of trying with no success, I did manage to get pregnant again. But literally the day I took a pregnancy test that confirm it, I had a miscarriage which started later that very same day. So that was a really sad and strange experience, because it was hopeful but then it was all over again so quickly…

After that, I was put on clomid for unexplained infertility, but it really didn’t agree with me at all - it made me feel really overly emotional and unwell. So we gave up on that pretty fast, and then we were referred for further fertility tests. But I massively struggled with it all feeling very invasive, so much so that it completely put me off exploring any further fertility treatment options.

I really respect women who go through IVF and other fertility procedures because it’s so brave and it’s such a hard process, both physically and emotionally. I also have a number of friends who it’s been really successful for, so I would never want to dissuade anyone else from considering it, but fairly early on I just knew that it wasn’t an option for me. Just thinking about the process made me so anxious and emotional, and so I quite quickly came to the realisation that if we were going to extend our family, adoption was probably the best route for us to explore.

Fortunately, the idea adoption or fostering a child in the future had always been a possibility for us anyway – it was something that both my husband and I had always talked about possibly being an option, but we just expected to do it once we’d had a couple of children of our own first.

Part of my own background is that I had experienced quite a lot of trauma in my own childhood, and so I guess I’d always just felt that supporting children who come from difficult family backgrounds was really important.

Soon after we came to this decision point, we applied to our local council’s adoption agency with an expression of interest through their website, and we got a phone call back from them straight. At the time, this felt like a confirmation that we were taking the next right step. It felt like it was falling into place almost as easily as my first pregnancy did.

We then went through the six month process of training, learning and being approved as adopters, which was really intensive, but a really good experience too because it felt like things were moving forwards really quickly.

This felt important to me at the time, because we didn’t want there to be too big a gap between our birth child and any adoptive child we took. But although the approval process all moved forwards fairly quickly, it then took a really long time before we were matched to a child.

I remember that this felt quite frustrating for me at the time because that age gap was just getting bigger and bigger while we waited, and because we felt ready to move forwards right away, but each child we expressed an interest in adopting would end up being placed with another family.

That part of the process can be quite an emotional rollercoaster really. It’s just full of high hopes followed by continued false starts and disappointments, and it’s not all that different to the process of trying to conceive in that sense really.

But what I later realised, looking back on the whole thing afterward, was that the child that was finally placed with us hadn’t even been born when we were first approved as adopters. And if you believe in God, or fate, or that everything happens for a reason, just as I do, then you just have to trust the process, and believe that the right child will come to you at the right time.

Adoption was absolutely the right decision for our family and I love my son to bits, but I would also advise anyone who is considering it to go into it with your eyes open because it’s not an easy thing to do either.

People often say to couples with fertility issues, ‘why don’t you just adopt?’ and its like it’s offered as if it’s a like for like replacement for having a birth child. But it’s not the same experience as raising a birth child at all, because of all the separation issues and trauma that an adopted child will have to deal with.

And in fact, even when an adopted child has had a really great foster placement before coming to you, they will still carry with them the trauma and grief of being separated from their birth family, and that can manifest itself in lots of complex ways.

That’s why I think it’s so important to work on your own healing, before you go into adoption. To enter into the adoption process, which can be so full of lots highs and lows and false stops and starts, is really hard unless you feel in a healthy place to navigate it all.

This is also one of the reasons that I’m so passionate about what SPACE does. I’ve experienced all kinds of personal grief in my life - not only the grief that comes with pregnancy loss and infertility, but I also lost my brother in a tragic road accident when I was younger, and I’ve also more recently lost a friend to cancer too.

What’s more, as part of my job in the Police, I am trained to visit families who we have break awful news to as well – like when a loved one dies in a road accident, or is murdered, or found dead, and this kind of shock and trauma and grief can be very complex.

And although we don’t always think of failed IVF or recurrent miscarriage or the slow drip, drip, drip of hopelessness which comes with failing to conceive month after month as trauma, it too is a form of trauma because it can also take us out of our ‘window of tolerance’ or beyond our ability to cope with normal life things in just the same way.

Grief after any form of loss is complex, and you don’t necessarily get ‘over’ any of these experiences – but I do believe you can learn to live around them, and it does get easier with time.

So for anyone who is facing a grief over infertility or pregnancy loss right now, I want to encourage you will get through this, but processing your feelings properly is so critical. Don’t be tempted to push down your pain, or to minimise it with thoughts like, ‘It was only an early pregnancy… it shouldn’t be that big a deal’. It is a big deal. What you’ve experienced is traumatic, and it’s okay to acknowledge that.

So keep talking about it in groups like space, or with trusted friends. See a counsellor or start journalling and writing about it, or whatever you need to do to help you process all that you’re going through. And most of all, look after yourself and keep practising good self-care with things like eating well, getting lots of sleep, and taking time out when you need it.