At Amsterdam Kids, we spend most of our time on life with children, where to take them, what to do on a rainy Tuesday, how to find your feet as a family here. But for many women, the road to motherhood starts long before any of that, and it’s rarely a straight line. Fertility challenges, IVF, or pregnancy after loss are hard enough at home. Living through them in a country that isn’t yours, in a healthcare system you’re still learning, without your usual support close by, adds a whole extra layer.
One woman working to close that gap is Rafaella Elias, founder of Little Miracle Creations. An IVF mother of two, Rafaella knows first-hand how fertility treatment tends to prioritise the physical process while the emotional side gets far less attention. Her own story ends in motherhood, but she’s open about how isolating the journey felt along the way, particularly when there was so little space for the emotional part of it.
Creating Space for Emotional Wellbeing
Rafaella started Little Miracle Creations after noticing how many women were struggling silently through fertility treatment and early motherhood. Medical care tends to focus on protocols and outcomes, understandably, but the emotional experience underneath it, the uncertainty, the loss, the hope, the waiting, often has nowhere to go.
Drawing on her background in health science and her long-term personal experience with neuro emotional integrative therapy, Rafaella works with women to help them stay emotionally grounded through fertility treatment and early motherhood. Her focus is on nurturing hope, processing complicated emotions, and helping women feel seen as whole people rather than patients moving through a system.
Resources for Fertility and Early Motherhood
Little Miracle Creations offers two resources built specifically for this stage:
- Little Miracle Milestones, The Guided Journal. A therapeutic journal with reflective prompts, visualisation exercises, and gentle mindset work for women navigating fertility, IVF, and early motherhood.
- Little Miracle Milestones, The Poetry Book. A collection of affirmation-based poems written as a dialogue between mother and baby, designed to offer comfort, hope, and emotional connection during hard moments.
More information on both is available at littlemiraclecreations.com.
Connecting International Women in the Netherlands
Beyond the written resources, Rafaella noticed a strong need for emotional connection among international women here. Many said they were looking for support in English, and for a space where infertility, IVF, donor conception, or pregnancy after infertility could be talked about openly, without having to explain or translate the context first.
That need became Little Miracle Journeys, a WhatsApp community for women and couples navigating fertility and early motherhood in the Netherlands. It’s a safe, welcoming space for sharing experiences and the harder emotional parts of the journey. Rafaella facilitates the conversations herself and occasionally invites professionals to join online discussions, with the long-term aim of hosting in-person meetups as the group grows.
Why Community Matters Here Specifically
Fertility struggles are isolating anywhere. Abroad, that isolation compounds, you might be navigating Dutch medical terminology in a second language, sitting through appointments without a familiar face beside you, or watching your usual network of friends and family follow the milestones from a time zone away. A community that understands both the fertility journey and the expat experience at the same time is doing something that neither a support group at home nor a local Dutch-language group can fully replicate.
If you’re earlier in this process, trying to conceive, mid-treatment, or newly pregnant after a difficult road, you don’t have to carry it alone or explain the whole backstory before someone understands. That’s exactly the gap groups like this exist to fill.
What Peer Support Actually Offers
It’s worth being clear about what a community like this is, and what it isn’t. It’s not medical advice, and it’s not a replacement for your midwife, GP, or fertility clinic, those relationships still matter and shouldn’t be substituted. What peer support does offer is something different: the relief of saying something out loud to people who don’t need it explained, and hearing “me too” from someone who genuinely means it.
For a lot of women, that’s the missing piece. You can have excellent medical care and still feel completely alone with the emotional weight of it, the two things aren’t the same, and one doesn’t replace the other. Having both is what makes the whole experience more bearable.
A Note from Amsterdam Kids
We aim to highlight not just activities and places for families, but the resources that support parents and parents-to-be at every stage of the journey, including the parts that happen before a baby arrives, or instead of one arriving in the way you expected.
Motherhood takes many forms, and access to understanding, connection, and emotional support can make a real difference along the way. If you’re further along and looking ahead to pregnancy itself, our guide on what to expect being pregnant in the Netherlands covers the practical side of the Dutch system. And if you’re parenting a child with additional needs, we’ve also written about the power of community in raising a child with a disability, a different stage, but a similar thread running through it. You can also browse our guides for more on settling into family life in the Netherlands, or sign up to the newsletter to hear about community meetups as they’re announced.
