Connections and conversations (Blog post)

One of the benefits of being physically in the DCN office is being able to answer the phone to people who call our helpline. We get fewer calls these days as more and more people use email to contact us. But, actually, it’s really nice for us to speak to people and offer that personal, human-to-human service. It can be rare these days with so many automated answer phone messages and text-based online help facilities.

Did you know, we have a fascinating mix of personal circumstances and experience in the DCN team, including egg donation, solo motherhood, double donation, treatment in Spain, anonymous donors, UK ID release donors, plus adoption, fostering and step-parenting? Oh, and we do also have one or two children in the mix who actually arrived in a more ‘traditional’ fashion.

The conversations we have in the office, sharing our own family stories over a tea break, are often fascinating! And that wonderful breadth of experience in our team gives us a real wealth of knowledge to draw on, not to mention our volunteers, facilitators and trustees.

Hopefully, it means that when people call us they get to hear a human voice and speak to someone really in the know. And we get to engage human-to-human too which is just so important.

It's very tempting to focus on the positives and the shared goal of creating a baby. But that isn’t the whole story. It’s important for people to be able to acknowledge loss and grief. They need a space to start thinking about this potential baby as a potential child, a potential teenager and then an adult. That can be difficult and uncomfortable.