My dad was my unlikely partner in my fertility journey. It brought us closer than we’ve ever been.

Izzy Shill’s father helped her through her fertility treatments.

In the beginning of 2020, I had moved back to LA and was living with my dad. At only 30 years old, I decided to freeze my eggs. After my mother’s early menopause and the subsequent very challenging adoption of my brother and sister, I knew it was the right choice for me. Single and exhausted by the numerous online dates, I decided that this procedure was a gift to myself. An act of radical self-love — something that did not come easily to me.

My first fertility consultation had been just a year before. In that brief span of time, I had lost half of my follicles. There was urgency now, panic. I had to act. And so, I purchased the outrageously expensive hormones, traveled to the clinic every other day to have the largest probes I’ve ever seen inserted into my body, and have my fate measured and calculated.

My dad and I settled into a routine

While I was groaning in the fetal position, my belly distended to the size of a three-month pregnancy, my father was at the end of the couch patting my foot encouragingly. He’s British. Bodies, certainly female ones, are not to be discussed. Nevertheless, he persisted.

He observed me from the side of his eye and mustered a quiet, “You alright?”

“Yeah, fine,” I replied.

Truthfully, I was. It felt like painful period cramps, and that phase of the process only lasted a few days.

Thankfully, “The Great British Bake Off” came to the rescue. During lockdown, we gathered every evening to watch two episodes — three, if we were being greedy — of the least competitive competition on television. We caught the baking bug, and we woke up successively earlier than the other and mix dough for that day’s concoction.

One morning, he walked downstairs and caught me in the act. “I thought I was going to bake bread today…” he mumbled.

I feigned regret. “Oh, sorry, Dad. I already started.” He responded only with an exhale. A tinge of guilt lingered until I proudly shared my creation with him.

Every other morning, he drove me to my appointments and then lingered in the waiting room. I’d return from the examination room and find him flicking though a carefully curated library of fertility literature with titles like “Eggs: Unscrambled,” or “The Big Freeze.”

Izzy Shill and her father loved baking while they lived together. 

We got closer than I expected through the process

He’d look up sheepishly, overwhelmed by the volume of possible and entirely unpredictable outcomes of the process. Suddenly he’d remember that he was supposed to play cheerleader. He’d hop to his feet and put his arm around my shoulder, ushering me back home.

One night, over a homemade shepherd’s pie (in total disregard of the 75℉ and sunny weather outside), he asked me why this was so important to me. I told him that our family’s story, one of heartbreak and fractures, needed to be rewritten. That this choice for me was was the gestation of a new dream of belonging that I was planting in the next generation. He nodded, acknowledging his own role in our family’s history, then reached for my plate and served me some more pie.

I was my dad’s roommate for six months during which I successfully froze a dozen mini-me’s. Now, we live a continent and an ocean apart from each other. He’s in the UK and I’m in Los Angeles. He’s getting older. I worry about his health and his heart, but will be eternally grateful that he overcame his own embarrassment to care for his daughter when she truly needed him.

Thank you, Dad.