Pic: Tammy Gardner

Hi everyone

A few weeks ago, I was leaning on a city balcony, looking out over a glorious Cape Town cityscape. I had a good glass of red, an interesting wodge of Madagascan cheese and a nice new person leaning next to me, while my sons played happily with hers on the grass below.

In short, it was an astonishingly smug mother moment.

"So, only the one kid then?" I asked, in a friendly overture kind of way. "Planning another one, or are you done?"

"Well, let's put it this way," she responded, nibbling thoughtfully on her bit of cheese. "That one kid cost me thousands of rands and years of drugs, angst and IVF. To be frank, I don't think there's another viable egg left in me. I am 42 and I let my eggs get too old."

Well, that brought me down to earth.

And isn't it just so true? In this, our Superwoman heyday (and no, it wasn't the 70s, it is now), kids just aren't on the first page of the priority list anymore. Sure, most of us want them, but not until we've got established in our jobs, we've got the family house, we've travelled, we've partied and, well, done as much as physically possible.

Which would all be great, if, of course, sperm could easily penetrate 37-year-old eggs. But often... it doesn't. And that's when you realise that having kids was always your first priority.

Of course this is merely one common thread in the sadness that is infertility in our generation. There are also those without men they want as fathers, those with dodgy wombs... there are a variety of reasons why women who want children can't have them, but all of them bring the same horrible sense of loss.

Tertia Albertyn has written a beautiful book called So Close, about the experience of being 'infertile and addicted to hope'. Tertia went from Clomid all the way through nine IVFs and for anyone battling infertility and wanting to connect with others who understand... her blog www.tertia.org is a brilliant place to start. We are also giving away five copies of her book this week, so click here to enter into that draw.

If you personally have an infertility story you'd like to share with others, or a question you'd like to ask our infertility expert, Dr Wiswedel, or even just a comment on the current apocalyptic movie on the theme, Children of Men... we'd love to hear from you.

Love and hope