Letters to an Embryo by Jasna Kaludjerovic
Letters to an Embryo is a true story, told in the form of a novel. Based on the author’s real-life experience, it follows a woman who, after a painful divorce, is left with a frozen embryo from her last IVF attempt — and no idea what to do with it.
Written as a series of raw, unfiltered letters to the embryo, the book explores the emotional and ethical complexity of motherhood, reproductive choice, guilt, and female identity.
This is not a story about becoming a mother. It’s about standing at the edge of that possibility, and the silent, inner war that unfolds when love, trauma, and biology collide.
📌 Content notes: infertility, IVF, frozen embryo, emotional trauma, divorce, ethical reflections on motherhood and autonomy
📌 For readers who appreciate: emotionally intense, brutally honest women’s fiction based on true events — with a voice that doesn’t soften the pain but walks straight through it.
Excerpt from the Book
Right now, my life is like some sort of meditation in the middle of an empty meadow, thinking about meaning and meaninglessness, while other people do something more concrete. Like they’re all on some path. Young people rush to get married, debtors to pay back their debts, unemployed to find a job. But I don’t know what path I’m on right now.
Once there was a path before me and I followed a chronology that seemed natural to me, believing it was the right one. And indeed, it might have been right for me, who can say: I fell head over heels in love with your papa when I was sixteen, perhaps too early and fatal for me to foresee the consequences of such a choice. I didn’t even feel that it was some sort of choice, it just happened, there was no choice. Then I went to a tough university that assured me of a good job when I graduated. When that was done, I married my first “no choice” and tried to get pregnant, and that’s when the troubles started… until the divorce, all along that same path.
If God had wanted me to bear children in that marriage, I would feel I was still on some path. The path would have seemed to fork and I’d taken the path that was actually just a little less popular than “married with two darling children”. After all, having children defines a person. Whether or not you find love, you have a child to love who takes up your attention and time. That would finally be a path, a direction of movement, tracks. Maybe new, maybe better or worse than before, but still a pathway.
Alas, no tracks were foreseen for me. Instead, I was thrown completely off the rails and landed in a meadow. And now I need to stay put.
The basic rule I’ve always followed, without actually knowing whether it’s right, is: when you don’t know what to do, take a little time, and don’t do anything. Is it just fear of making the wrong move? Maybe not doing anything is the wrong decision. Making no mistakes.
When I have to decide whether or not to accept a flirt, it’s a lot easier with this freedom. If I let him go and shouldn’t have, another one will come along. If I accept him and shouldn’t have, I’ll let him go and that’s that.
Deciding how to spend my time is also not very hard. Right now, I’m writing this letter. If I get tired of it, I’ll put it aside before I finish my coffee. I started knitting a sweater six months ago and it’s over there, waiting on the needles for me to finish it. So what? Everything can be ripped out, then you move on to something else that’s a satisfying way to spend your time.
The only important decision hanging over my head is what to do with you. Your situation and mine is quite specific.
In normal pregnancies everything starts when the woman finds out she’s pregnant. The only thing to do is let it progress or abort it. The choice is: life or death. I, of course, would always choose life. In your case and mine, however, it’s not quite that simple.
On the one hand, you’re my child. Sixty-some cells that comprise the life of an organism. Homo sapiens, just like all the rest. Fifty percent my genes. I made you intentionally, with a clear mind and sound judgment, while married, when I still wanted a child with your papa. In that sense, you’re the same as every other child. The only difference is that since you came to be in the form in which you exist, as a fertilized egg, you’ve never been inside your mother’s body.
There were four of you in all. You resulted from the last IVF attempt just before the divorce. Two of the embryos were the most advanced, so they decided to put them back inside me. They said that you and the fourth one were of poorer quality and would probably not turn into blastocysts that could be frozen. In any case, they left you to grow as much as you could.
The waiting period to see whether the two embryos had successfully gestated was more difficult than with the previous two failed IVF attempts. Relations with your papa had already become strained. The fact that I was undergoing IVF treatment didn’t help matters much, so for that reason or who knows what other reason, the pregnancy failed.
Several days before learning the results of the IVF procedure, we decided to divorce for completely different reasons.
The divorce was the greatest stress in my life thus far. I loved your papa. The things I found out about him destroyed a lot more than just our marriage: a whole concept of love and trust, my perception of your papa and our relationship, of myself with regard to love and life. The world I knew collapsed. The world of a princess transported by love kept alive by a handful of beautiful lies.
Disillusionment. Deep wounds. Knockout.
Two-and-a-half years later I’m still recuperating from it all and don’t know whether it’s properly done. I think things are going well, but – who knows. I felt sorry for your papa in a way, because he lost me without being ready and willing to lose me. But I felt even sorrier for him because he had to come to terms with his responsibility for everything he’d done to me. Because it all came out: from the love of my life, the object of so many sacrifices and so much love, he became a monster ready to hurt and deceive me in three hundred terrible ways. Someone who had to disappear from my life straightaway. I cried my eyes out and suffered to the utmost; I wanted him out of my life. At any cost.
That very same awful day when I decided to divorce, they called from the laboratory to tell me that one of the two remaining poorer quality embryos had nonetheless survived. That was you.
They even said you surprised them, that you were multiplying a lot faster and better than average for the fifth day after conception. And you were high-quality. They had underestimated you! They asked whether we wanted to pay to have you frozen.
That phone call made me happy. I was thrilled that you were alive! It was like some sort of victory. Something nice. I thought you were sure to be a fierce fighter who’d certainly find your way in the maelstrom of everything that was happening and the madhouse in which you came to be. You’d find your way to be born, to live and grow up. I even thought, like a real mama, that you’d certainly be a determined character, a real dragon, ambitious and successful in everything you did. I still hold onto that feeling, that vision. That you will be born, if nothing else. In your case, even that would be a great success!
The decision to pay for freezing the embryo was easy. Not paying would have been the same thing as an abortion, of course. And it wasn’t possible to put you back inside me right then. A certain number of days had to pass from the previous menstrual cycle, so even in the happiest marriage with the parents’ overwhelming love, you would’ve been frozen for at least several days. And so they froze you.
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