Hayley Hendrix had always assumed she would get married and have kids – until a single conversation turned things upside down.
At 39 it seemed like Hayley Hendrix was on the right track to becoming a mum.
The Queensland woman, now 45, had spent her thirties working in her dream career as a TV producer in Los Angeles.
At 37, Ms Hendrix had begun dating the man she assumed would eventually become her husband and father to their children.
But her plans of becoming a mum were shattered during an offhand conversation which revealed her boyfriend had no intentions of getting serious with her.
“While we were laying there embracing each other in the early hours of the morning he said, ‘Hals, you’re going to make a wonderful wife to someone one day,’” Ms Hendrix said.
“I was like, holy crap, this guy is going to cost me a family if I stay.”
Shattered, Ms Hendrix, who appears on Tuesday night’s episode of Insight on SBS, moved back to Australia to gather her thoughts. The pair eventually broke up.
It was then she began to realise her dream of becoming a mother could be out of reach.
At 40, a woman’s chance of falling pregnant is just 5 per cent compared to a 25 to 30 per cent probability in their early to mid-twenties.
Desperate not to lose any time, Ms Hendrix booked in to see a fertility doctor.
She underwent several unsuccessful rounds of IUI, otherwise known as intra-uterine insemination, using sperm from a donor bank.
“I had three IUIs and none of them worked,” Ms Hendrix said. “I was shocked when they didn’t.”
Ms Hendrix’s doctor then labelled her “medically infertile” and advised IVF was her only option.
It was at this point Ms Hendrix decided to press pause on her medical fertility journey and go rogue, turning to Facebook to find out what her other options were. It was there she discovered a group which linked women looking for sperm with men willing to donate.
So began the nerve-racking process of finding a donor, with Ms Hendrix eventually finding the Melbourne man who would father her child, and the two began chatting.
“He ticked some physical attributes that were important to me, he had STIs [tests] done, he also had his own family so I knew he could create his own children,” she said.
After getting to know each other, Ms Hendrix decided to fly down from Queensland to Melbourne to try and conceive a baby.
It was similar to meeting up for a first date after weeks of texting – except there was no sexual attraction involved.
“It was a combination of fear and excitement … there was a lot riding on it,” she said.
Ms Hendrix and the man went back to the hotel where he made the first of three “alternative inseminations” – providing semen which was injected into her vagina using a needle-less syringe.
Three weeks later the miracle Ms Hendrix had been chasing for two years was confirmed: She was pregnant.
Ms Hendrix gave birth to son Remy, now three, in 2018 and says becoming a mother has transformed her life for the better.
“He’s my world. I haven’t had a night off in three-and-a-half years,” Ms Hendrix said. “I just wouldn’t change anything … we have a wonderful relationship.”
Remy has met his donor father and Ms Hendrix frequently shares updates with him. She plans to explain to her son about how he was conceived when the time comes.
She’s written a book about her experience, Desperately Seeking Semen, and believes stigma is reducing around non-medical fertility journeys like hers.
Ms Hendrix encourages other women to consider becoming what she calls “accidentally” pregnant as you don’t need to be married or even in a relationship to become a mum.
“Women overthink it, because we’re too busy looking for ‘the one’ and I think we should stop searching for ‘the one’,” she said.
Ms Hendrix also advises single women to “look within their communities” for donors first if they want to become pregnant rather than just going straight to a fertility clinic.
“Have those conversations with people,” she said.
“Give up on the idea of what you thought life would look like … work with what you’re sitting with right now.”
You can hear more from Hayley and others on Delaying Motherhood tonight on SBS Insight at 8.30pm.
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