Imagine yearning for something intensely for an extended period, encountering countless challenges along the way, and finally achieving it. The overwhelming sense of joy and relief you experience is everything but certainly not blasé, especially when it surpasses your initial expectations.

 

Joy, pride, astonishment, and eternal gratitude are now Sibulele Sibaca-Nomnganga’s constant companions. After three years of struggling to conceive, she finds herself marveling at the double blessing of now nursing two babies.

 

“Some days, I walk into the nursery and think, ‘Oh, snap. There are two people here, and they’re all mine.’ Especially because I had reached a point where I thought having a baby was impossible. When I see them every day, I’m amazed that there are two of them. It’s something I’m still getting used to, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” said the bubbly mommy.

 

Sibulele, a well-known social entrepreneur with a compelling life story, married the love of her life in 2019 and the couple almost immediately started to conceive, although casually, because, as Sibulele says, “my biological clock was ticking. I knew we needed to do this quickly.”

 

“In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we began trying with intention. We were deliberate in our efforts.”

 

Between 2020 and 2021, the couple embarked on the fertility journey when they couldn’t conceive naturally, which included In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), then Intrauterine Insemination (IUI), before returning to IVF, of which all failed at each attempt. After the fourth round of IVF, the emotional, physical and financial toll was enough to make them consider giving up.

 

“That didn’t mean we stopped wanting children. It was our dream, I had a deep longing to be a mom. And even while we tried to achieve other goals, growing the business, and also mourning my husband’s mother’s passing which was a huge blow to us, the longing was still there.

 

“The hardest thing about trying to fall pregnant and not succeeding is seeing people around you falling pregnant. Social media was flooding with pregnancy talks over and over again and that had me questioning God, because you see people falling pregnant in the most imperfect situations. As happy as I was for my friends and everyone else, I was hurting too,” she said.

 

The couple also kept this part of their journey in 2020/2021 a secret because they couldn’t bear explaining the constant disappointments to people or Sibulele feeling inadequate that she “couldn’t do the one God-given job and that is to bear children”, she said.  The journey was lonely.

 

“At the beginning of last year, my husband brought up the conversation again, suggesting we try one last time. And this time, we did things differently.”

 

The difference this time around, for her, was taking the pleas to God. “And not to say randomly before I wouldn’t sit in my corner and pray but I feel like I wasn’t intentional about it. This time we took the plan to God and demanded a baby.”

 

She also rallied up a small support system that all prayed with them at designated times and also saw a dietician that helped change her eating plan.

 

“The one thing that she (dietician) told me to do was to drop sugar. So if you are looking to get pregnant, cut down on Coca-Cola and the fizzies. That is a great starting point, coupled with all the other adjustments that were needed.”

 

Their last and final try, the doctor inseminated two eggs with the confidence that one would  implant.

 

The switch from praying for just one child to expecting two, Sibulele says there was no real preparation in it but reality kicked in when she started buying two of everything.

 

“And while I was preparing for their arrival, I was also so afraid of being overly excited, because I didn’t want to jinx it in any way. That fear comes from the constant losses that we suffered. And also, I might come home with one or none” she opened up.

 

Her pregnancy was equally filled with struggle. Sibulele was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, caused by the minimizing of sugar (yes, this sounds contradictory but it happens, hence a dietician is important to help balance things out), being extremely sick in the first three months of her pregnancy, and almost losing the pregnancy in week 20.

 

“My uterine lining was extremely thin that I had not gone in for a scheduled specialist doctor and had the doctor not picked it up and suggested that I get an emergency operation called a cervical cerclage, we would lose the pregnancy. In isiXhosa, we have a saying ‘isisu saphuncuka’ (which means having a miscarriage).

 

“At 20 weeks, those are human beings so I got that surgery done and I was on bed rest for the rest of December. In January, I started bleeding quite a bit and I was in and out of hospital. And in the beginning of February, I was in hospital the entire month until I gave birth in the first week of March. So it wasn’t an easy pregnancy at all. We just kept claiming it (a successful pregnancy),” she said.

Three months into motherhood, her life is complete, adding that the turmoil of it all was worth it.

 

“The most rewarding thing about everything that I went through is how excited my husband is. So it’s not even about me or my babies but how I hear my husband speak about the boys, how his life has seemingly changed, the plans he now has, and how complete he seems because the boys are here. Those, for me, are conversations that I would have never gotten to hear.”

 

And although her husband has three other children, there is something different now in relation to his age as he is chasing his mid-forties and his desire for stability.

 

“For this period of his life, I think God is just ticking all the boxes for him including having a family. And although he is obsessed with the boys, we must be honest that he just loves talking about the boys and not so much the doing,” she said laughing.

 

Now that she is a mother, the level of grace that she extends to other mommies has elevated – understanding that each mother is trying to do their best in this unpredictable journey.

 

“With the kind of work that I do with the organisation, I have always been a mother to the many girls and women that I work with everyday. But having my own is very different, having carried them, the amount of sacrifices I had to make adds such a huge layer to it all. There are many types of moms to be celebrated but this one is a little different. It just feels like a part of you dies to give birth to them. It is amazing,” she said.