By Casey Neill
Gabrielle Williams always had in the back of her mind that she “probably couldn’t have kids”.
“As a protective mechanism I worked from the assumption that I couldn’t, and therefore tried not to want it too much,” the Dandenong MP and State Government Minister said.
“As I got older and then made the call to do IVF, I wanted it a lot more.
“With every failure and loss and with the clock ticking, that longing grows.
“I also began to think it was less and less likely.”
She was approaching 40 and over 5.5 years had been through multiple IVF cycles to circumvent her polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
“I’d already made the decision that I couldn’t keep going, I couldn’t keep doing it, so that was it,” she said.
Then Ruairí came along.
“He was the last embryo,” Gabrielle said.
“I’d ended up with five or six, which was a pretty good haul of embryos, but by the time I got them tested, that wiped out all of them bar one.
“I was convinced it wasn’t going to work and almost moved on the minute I’d had it done.
“I went straight back to work from the clinic and got on with my day.”
“I was less manic about that round.
“It wasn’t occupying every minute of my thoughts the way that every other round had.”
A self-described “chronic pregnancy tester”, Gabrielle took an at-home test five days post embryo transfer.
“It came up positive and I thought ‘oh yeah, I’ve been here before though and it’s faded’,” she said.
She tested again on days six, seven and eight and that line kept getting darker.
“But I was still not ready to get too excited yet,” she said.
“Then we got into the world of scans and he was there and confirmed.
“Then I thought I lost him at six weeks. I was convinced I’d lost him.”
She’d had a bleed but it was the weekend, so her specialist told her to come in on Monday.
But one of her sisters wouldn’t let her wait under the worry. She drove Gabrielle to Monash Medical Centre and waited outside for her, in the midst of Covid challenges.
“I hadn’t at any point heard the baby’s heartbeat before then, and I wasn’t expecting it would be there,” she said.
“I’d kept it together until then, but I completely fell in a heap when I heard him and he was fine.”
Despite having her age and PCOS as risk factors, Gabrielle’s pregnancy progressed well.
“It was hard getting to him, but when he was there it seemed to run fairly smoothly,” she said.
Gabrielle had started the IVF process while she was married, but when the relationship broke down she was determined to continue the process alone.
“That meant going through a sperm donor, which is not an easy process,” she said.
She thought hard about whether to ask someone she knew but decided an anonymous donor was the best option for her.
“We do have a donor shortage so the list is pretty thin. Sometimes you have to wait quite a while for the right one,” she said.
She waited a few weeks, requesting the list of potential donors at 7am every morning.
“If you found one that was appropriate you had to be really quick at requesting it,” she said.
“There’s legislative caps on how many families each donor can have. We’ve just changed it from 10 women to 10 families.
“It’s a bit of a competition to land your donor.
“Because I’m raising him as a single mum – it sounds a bit silly, and perhaps it is silly – but I wanted him to feel as connected to me as he could.
“So I was looking for someone with the basic attributes that I had – brown hair, brown eyes, but hopefully a bit taller.
“That is what I found, basically. I even found a donor that said he had wavy hair as well.”
There’s no compensation for sperm donors.
“And it’s not an easy process because you’ve got to provide a lot of information about yourself, there’s genetic screenings,” she said.
“So men who commit to doing this, it’s a big commitment.
“I find myself now always having conversations with friends who fit the eligibility criteria, saying ‘you should do this’, it’s really helpful and it changes someone’s life for minimal inconvenience to them in the greater scheme.
“Statistically, there are more and more women having children on their own.
“There’s going to be more of us, not less, which means the role of donors then becomes more important.”
Gabrielle made a “calculated decision” to become a single mum.
“I weighed up the reality of doing it alone pretty heavily and had conversations with my family about it,” she said.
“For me to be able to do it, I had to make sure I had plenty of support from them.
“I’m very blessed to be one of four girls so I’ve got three big sisters.
“I knew I had their support and they were very eager to give me that support.”
Her parents are also a huge support. But the reality of entering motherhood solo?
“It’s a shell shock for everyone,” she laughed.
“My mum was in the delivery room with me. He was born first thing in the morning.
“You get to the end of the day and you’re in bed and mum’s gone home and I remember having him lying in the bassinet next to me and thinking ‘oh wow, what now?’.
“It was just me and him.
“It was a very big jump in the deep end, not having anyone with me that first night.
“I thought ‘it’s never going to be quite so hard, in a way, as it is tonight’ because it’s all new, I’m confined to the bed because I’d just had a caesarean.
“By the time the sun came up and he was still alive and he was still looking happy and I was OK I thought ‘I can do this’.
“It was a good crash course, those first 24 hours.”
Ruairí was four months old when we spoke and, like most mums, Gabrielle was still in the thick of figuring out motherhood – and how to make it work alongside a demanding career.
“What works this week might not work next week, so I’m having to build that uncertainty into my diary and into how I work,” she said.
“There’s a serenity, almost, attached to the fact that you can’t change it and it is what it is.
“I’m fortunate enough to be in a job that does give me some flexibility.”
Breastfeeding and pumping mean carting a pump and other supplies around Parliament House, and instigating a parenting room.
“I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to feed and it’s happened quite easily for me, which isn’t the case for everybody,” she said.
“But feeding is a challenge, it’s a challenge that I continue to navigate.
“You never master it.
“I do find that there’s a calm in just accepting that you can’t predict it.”
Gabrielle has great support from her electorate and ministerial staff.
“They’ve all had to learn how to do their jobs a little bit differently,” she said.
“But they’ve ridden the journey with me as well.
“Now that he’s here they’re all rapt.”
Ruairí was born just weeks before the 2022 Victorian State election.
“I did my first press conference two weeks after he was born and he came with me,” Gabrielle said.
“I had to be doing it and it was important.
“I tried to target what I was doing.”
Previously she would have spent every day at pre-polling booths, from open to close. So she cut back the hours.
“The upside of having him when I’ve had him is on the back of Covid, we’ve got a lot more used to doing things online,” she said.
Gabrielle was first elected in 2014 and never considered stepping away from the seat.
“I’ll always do this job as long as I’ve got the passion for it,” she said.
“Having him didn’t change that.
“If anything it’s made me more impatient for change.
“I can see in my own domestic circumstances the impact of what we do and in very real terms the idea that you want to leave the place better than where you found it.
“He’s another inspiration point and a reminder of why we’re here and what we’re doing.”
Gabrielle was reluctant to give any advice to other women battling infertility. She’s acutely aware that everyone’s situation is different.
“Be kind to yourself, no matter what decision you come to,” she said.
“You can’t be influenced by whatever anyone else says. It’s not their experience.
“The only advice I can give is you’ve got to listen to your own circumstance and make the call yourself.
“You’ll get pulled in different directions
“Keep checking in with yourself.
“You can get caught on the roller coaster of it.”
Watching Gabrielle hold a smiling Ruairí on her lap while we chat, it’s obvious that every low on her roller coaster was worth it.
“He’s everything I could have hoped,” she said.
