I married my sperm donor... and found my happily ever after!
Five years on, Aminah’s back-to-front love story is still the stuff of fairytales
It sounds like the plot of a romantic comedy – a woman has a miracle baby via a sperm donor and IVF, then meets the donor and falls in love.
But for Aminah Hart and husband Scott Andersen, this is their real-life fairytale.
The couple, who live on a Simmental stud farm in Ryanston, Victoria, met in 2012 shortly after Aminah gave birth to their daughter Leila, now nine.
Curious about her daughter’s father, Aminah and her mother Helen took their search online, with only Scott’s first name, his profession and knowledge that he coached football.
After finally connecting, Aminah and Scott, now 49, began corresponding via email, met in person soon after, fell in love and were married in 2016.
And while theirs might be an unconventional love story, the happy family wouldn’t change a thing.
TEAMWORK
“I’m eternally grateful for having met Scott,” says Aminah, 51, who admits she still can’t believe she swapped her city life in Melbourne working in marketing and sales for life on Scott’s farm.
“We’ve had ups and downs but here we are, nearly eight years later. We are so different but we really complement each other... we make a pretty good team.”
Their unique love story is no secret to daughter Leila, who knows all about how her parents met and how she was born. With her curly blonde locks and blue eyes, she’s the spitting image of her dad, while Aminah admits her daughter’s sass and tenacity are her doing.
‘If you persevere, life can get good again’
“Scott always says that she and I are really similar personalities so there’s a little bit of headbutting that goes on,” Aminah chuckles.
“She’s a really happy, positive little girl, it’s like he’s just cloned himself, and it’s extraordinary.”
Since first sharing their story on Australian Story five years ago, Aminah has penned a book about her experience called How I Met Your Father. Aminah and Scott were flooded with messages from couples across the globe who were touched by their story.
“I had about 1200 messages from across the world, from people reaching out saying our story was amazing,”
Aminah shares. “I was gobsmacked. It took me about three months to reply to all the message.”
A lot has changed for Aminah since tying the knot with Scott, including the move to the country and a new career. Together they started a property company in 2017, and according to Aminah, it’s gone “gangbusters”.
“I thought if I can sell advertising content to people, I can sell houses,” she says.
“Scott goes to the farm, checks all these cows, does what he has to do and then come nine o’clock in the morning he metamorphosises into a real estate agent.
“We sold hundreds upon hundreds of properties in the years we’ve been going, and the business is really, really successful... as a farmer, people trust him to sell the big rural properties.”
Grateful to be in such a happy place in her life, it wasn’t always so for Aminah. Before turning to IVF and meeting Scott she lost two sons, Marlon and Louis, shortly after birth to a rare disorder called X-linked myotubular myopathy.
Only affecting little boys, the genetic disease causes muscle weakness and sufferers are often unable to breathe or move unassisted.
WAKE-UP CALL
Then, in 2019, when her daughter was only seven, Aminah’s world was shattered once again when the mum was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“That was a real wake-up call to me,” Aminah recalls. “It was caught quite early just at a routine mammogram and they discovered breast cancer, so I had a double mastectomy.
“It was a huge lesson for me to make the best of every day... but thankfully at the moment I’m here, I seem to be healthy.”
And while Aminah and Scott considered having another baby, they ultimately decided on a “fur child” instead, welcoming Archie, a blue staffy, to the family. He’s become Leila’s bestie.
“She calls him her ‘little brother’,” Aminah explains with a chuckle. “He’s gorgeous, they wrestle and they carry on and they just love each other.”
Reflecting on the hardships and joy she’s experienced, Aminah says the biggest lesson she has learned is that things can always turn around.
“Through the greatest of adversity, if you persevere, life can get good again,” she says. “We are living life and making the best of it... I would say that I’m deeply and truly happy.”