Bryony Farmer took a different route to motherhood after years of battling with her lack of sexual attraction to anyone
Last weekend, my baby boy Oryn turned one. As I helped him blow out the candle on his first birthday cake, he beamed up at me and I felt a rush of pride and joy.
It was followed immediately by the heart-stopping thought, ‘What if I hadn’t been brave enough to have you?’ That might be an odd thing for a young mum of 26 to say – after all, deciding to try for a baby is not an act of bravery per se. But, for me, having a child meant taking a huge leap of faith. Since my teens, I’ve lived with two – seemingly conflicting – certainties: one, that I desperately wanted to become a mother; and that I’m asexual. Those who are asexual experience little or no sexual attraction to others. Many people who identify as asexual do not want to have sex, and some choose never to do so. So, from the start, having a baby felt like a puzzle to be solved – given that, unlike many of my friends, I didn’t grow up convinced I’d fall in love with a tall, handsome stranger with whom I’d be desperate to start a family.
I could have agonised for years over how I would ever have a child. But then, aged 20, a degree of urgency was thrown into the mix. After years of painful periods I was diagnosed with adenomyosis, a condition that causes the lining of the uterus to wrongly grow within its muscular wall.
I was told the disease is degenerative; many women develop fertility issues and ultimately need a hysterectomy.
Early fascination
So, aged 24, I decided to have a child using a sperm donor. For me, it was never a case of ‘if’ I would have a baby, only ‘when’. An only child myself, my earliest memories are of being fascinated by babies: what they did, how they played, what made them smile. I knew I wanted to be a mum. However, the first apparent hurdle to those dreams of motherhood appeared in adolescence. Aged 13, I simply didn’t get it when friends became consumed by their crushes on boys.
They’d pore over pictures of the likes of the actor Zac Efron and the singer Justin Bieber in magazines and gossip excitedly about boys they’d seen, but it all left me cold. My lack of interest made me wonder whether I might be gay, so I tried looking at girls the way they did boys. But that didn’t stir up any feelings either.
Before I could dwell on all this much further, aged 15 I became extremely ill with
