After 23 IVF attempts:
Mary Coustas’ daughter, Jamie, just might have been the most longed-for little girl in the world, and now she’s one of the most loved. Mary talks to Samantha Trenoweth about the taboos she confronted on her heartbreaking IVF journey, and about the surpris
Mary Coustas – “my daughter changed my life”
Mary Coustas smiles and her dark eyes shine as three-yearold Jamie runs across the courtyard and into her arms. The joy in the air is palpable. Mary and Jamie exchange the secret looks, private jokes and effortless understanding of mothers and daughters who share a spontaneous, unconditional love. After a herculean battle for a child, Mary has, at 52, become a thoroughly relaxed, warm, natural mum.
“I’m good at difficult stuff too,” she laughs, walking across cobblestones to the barn, where Jamie has spotted the miniature white pony, Thumbelina, “and I hope I don’t invite trouble because I definitely think I need some long service leave from it now.”
The last decade of Mary’s life has been “gigantic”. The actress and comedian is best known as the creator of the quirky Greek-Australian everywoman, Effie, who was introduced to Aussie audiences back in 1989 on TV comedy, Acropolis Now. But between 2005 and 2015, Mary’s career took second place to her struggle to become a mother – a struggle that began just six weeks after she married her true love, the advertising executive, George Betsis.
A laparoscopy detected blocked fallopian tubes. Mary was 40, George was 45. She’d always been interested in adoption – “even before Angelina and Brad were born, I’d made a decision one day I’d adopt” – but Australian law requires less than a 40-year age difference between parents and child. Mary was told her only hope of becoming a mother was through IVF.
Mary had 15 attempts at conceiving before she switched to donor eggs. “I just wasn’t getting there with my own eggs,” she remembers. “I had very close relationships with my doctors and one of them said to me, ‘I can’t watch you do this to yourself over and over.’ He said if I switched to donor eggs, my chances would jump to around 50 per cent. And I’m good at dispelling taboos. It’s the way I like to dismantle life. The taboo around IVF wasn’t the procedure – it was the donor eggs.”
Even so, the decision to forego the use of her own eggs was tough. “We’re conditioned to compare the child to the parent,” Mary admits, “to take credit for the good and the beautiful and the noticeable similarities: ‘Oh look, she’s got her mother’s eyes.’ It’s really hard to let go of that.
“On the other hand, my whole life, I’d wanted to adopt. Even as a child
I’d known there were children out there who needed to have happy homes. So, in the end, I adopted an egg. I carried it. There’s plenty of proof that, by growing that egg and having it in me, there was a crossover, and that I influenced it. So, it took a lot for me to finally make that decision but it was poetic, and sort of perfect.”
By coincidence, Mary and George learned one of the world’s leaders in IVF using donor eggs was a GreekAustralian, Dr Kostas Pantos, with a practice in Athens.
“So I thought, of course I’ll go to Greece,” Mary explains. “My culture is there, the results are there, the donor is anonymous and so are we, and the doctor speaks English. I’d have the support of my extended family. It made sense.”
Mary’s mother, Fani, flew over to join her. “She was so supportive,” Mary says. “She said, ‘do whatever it takes,’ and she was very comfortable with the idea of a donor egg.” But the results were not instant. After Mary’s 16th IVF attempt, she and her mother talked about visiting a church on the island of Tinos that is considered a holy shrine and a source of miracles.
“I’d been to see this woman in Athens,” Mary remembers, “who was half Colleen McCullough, half Deepak Chopra and she gave me a reading and told me I needed to pray. The following day, we went to the island and I prayed with all my heart. I was saying, ‘I’m trying to do this with scientists and doctors, and it’s not happening.
You must be the missing link. God, universe, she-mother, whoever, I can’t do this without your influence. I need something mystical and magical.”
Two weeks later, in December 2010, Mary was pregnant. Triplets were detected but doctors rated their chances of survival low. A “reduction”, which entailed aborting two of the three longed-for foetuses, was carried out but, even then, the last of the triplets, daughter Stevie, died during a premature birth at 22 weeks.
“Afterwards, when I spoke and wrote about Stevie’s birth,” Mary says, “I knew I was dispelling another taboo: the taboo around stillbirths. Death and birth arrive at the same time, and that’s very difficult. No one wants to talk about death. It’s as if, in talking about it, we’re inviting it in.”
Mary took some time after Stevie’s birth but eventually returned to Greece, where IVF continued without success. It was devastating. “You cut deals with yourself,” she says now. “You say, what am I prepared to do and how far am I prepared to go? You renegotiate after each attempt. I didn’t ever say, ‘I won’t stop until I get there,’ but with every attempt I wanted it more and more. You don’t know who you are or what you’ll do until you’re in the midst of it.”
George also suffered from the loss of Stevie. “Men lose babies too,” Mary insists, “but they don’t get the same communication, advice and support. George was on that IVF journey with me, these were his children.”
George had another child, Tomas, who was living with his mother, Priscilla Dunstan, in LA. A custody battle had broken out after his mother cancelled Tom’s previously agreed school holiday visits with George and Mary. Frustrated and missing his son after seven months without contact, George flew to the US unannounced, collected Tom from school and took him on a 12-day escapade that landed George in legal hot water. “The matter was finally resolved,” Mary explains, “and we look forward to making up for the years we lost,” but this was another stressful sub-plot running through Mary’s life.
Back in Greece, Mary had just received the news that IVF procedure number 22 had been fruitless. “I hit my lowest point ever,” she admits, “lower even than after I lost Stevie, because I had run out of hope.”
Mary was alone in Greece. “I had retired Mum, after Stevie, from her
role as my constant support because it was too much sadness. But I rang her now and told her the bad news. She said to me: ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do it, I know you can’t even lift your head, but I need you on your feet tomorrow. You need to get onto that ferry and go back to that church. It delivered for us once; it will deliver again. Find the strength.’ So I did.
“I also called George. He said, ‘I’m coming. We’re going to give it one more go.’ He caught the next plane out and, the following morning, while he was in the air, I caught the ferry. On my last visit, I hadn’t been to where they christen the children. This time, I was taken down there, below the altar, to this cave-like, candle-lit baptismal room. When I walked into that room, I was so overwhelmed, I quickly made a deal with upstairs. I said, without even thinking, ‘If you are able to deliver me a healthy baby, I promise I will come back here and christen it in this room.’ And I did.”
Jamie was born on November 25, 2013. George described her birth as “the most beautiful thing I had ever seen”. And 15 months after her last visit, Mary returned to the island of Tinos to christen her baby girl.
“The miracle happened at 49, and the miracle wasn’t that I conceived. The miracle was I didn’t give up trying to,” Mary says. “I’ve got a friend who is an atheist. She says to me, ‘Oh church, I can’t believe in it,’ and I say to her, ‘Trust me, when you’re up against the ropes and have tried everything else, you’re going to reach out to God or the universe or something.’ I’m not particularly religious but in my darkest moment, I reached out. I don’t know what happened but … I’ve seen enough miracles and enough tragedies and I believe there’s something else at play.”
Jamie’s birth changed everything. “Absolutely everything,” Mary grins. “It has definitely made me a better person. I’m more empathetic. I’m quicker to laughter but I’m quicker to tears. It has been pretty confronting.
“After Jamie’s birth, I felt like my composure had disappeared. I didn’t have a shield anymore. I was walking through life inside-out. We try to mask ourselves, numb and medicate ourselves from feeling. It’s a pointless exercise because life will force it out of us. I used to always send my brain out first. I don’t do that anymore. My brain and my emotions come out together. Shit will happen to all of us. My mother always says, ‘Every person has a story,’ and it’s true.”
Mary became an older mother, a third taboo she’s tackling on a daily basis, and is smitten with motherhood. “The best part,” she says, “is the fullness it brings; how it fleshes out everything. There’s the joy of watching Jamie evolve – the joy she brings to so many others apart from me. How simple the reminders are. I pick a flower and give it to her and it brings her so much happiness. It is the redefining of what is important,
I know you can’t lift your head, but I need you on your feet tomorrow. ”
what’s special. The other joys are watching her sleep or smelling her or hugs and kisses – all the physical stuff. The challenging bit is the time management. I have a job that I love and it requires a lot of commitment.”
Mary’s career is currently taking her on a national tour in Effie the Virgin Bride. It’s the Effie we know and love, but there are some surprise twists as well, including a cameo from her real life creator. It’s the first time Mary has appeared as herself on a comedy stage.
“I think I’m a better performer because of the experiences I’ve been through and survived,” Mary muses, “and because I know Jamie exists – that’s given me a lot of peace.”
Does she resent the hours her career keeps her away from Jamie? Not at all. “Being a wife, daughter, mother, performer – each of those is one thing, it’s not everything, and if you’re lucky enough to have a lot of those things, then you have a rich life. My identity isn’t built on one pillar and I don’t want Jamie’s to be either. Because George and I are older parents, she needs to put in those foundations of broader, richer, more diverse understandings of love and family and her world.
“There’s going to be a point where we’re not going to be around and she’ll need to be independent and confident, I have to teach her that. We want her to be like a bowerbird, stealing from everywhere to make this rich sense of self. It takes a village, and I have plenty of village people.”
Some of Mary’s “village people” are her mother and in-laws, who chip in and babysit when Mary can’t be there. Others are family and friends in Greece, because Mary and George are experimenting with life in two villages. Right now, they’re both hard at work on their Australian careers but three months every year they live in Greece.
“In the words of Wham! – God bless George Michael’s soul – I choose life,” Mary laughs. “I’m happy to work harder and smarter for nine months so I can have three rich months where I can forget about work and live.”
In Greece Jamie has developed her fascination with farm animals and picked up her impressive Greek language skills. “When we’re there,” Mary says, “we speak Greek, have a siesta every afternoon and go to the farmer’s market. We’re obsessed with the market. Everything is seasonal and divine. There is bread, olives, fetta, eggs, fish, seasonal fruits and vegetables. I didn’t know tomatoes were a fruit until I ate them in Greece.”
At three, Jamie is vivacious and beautiful and carries on grown-up conversations in two languages. She’s not old enough yet to understand the immensity of her mother’s effort to bring her into this world, or the particulars of her conception, but one day she will.
“We won’t make a big deal of it,” Mary says softly. “We’ll say, it takes many things to make a baby, and an egg is one of those things. It’s not everything. It takes sperm, it takes a womb, it takes a million things. I want her to know the lengths I went to. I want her to know that I went to the other side of the world and pushed myself outside of what I thought was possible in order to have her.
“I also want her to know, for her journey, that whatever gets thrown her way, she can go outside of the power of herself in order to overcome it and create the life she wants.”
I want her to know I went to the other side of the world. ”