When I found out that our recent attempt at IVF using the last of our frozen embryos did not work, I felt gutted.  This was the first week in December or so, the final month in what was a very difficult year.  In a way, it felt inevitable — the cherry of failure to cap off the year.  Maybe I never expected it to work — maybe that was the problem.  Maybe I had expected it to work — maybe that, too, was the problem.  The night before I took the test, I ran a bath, chanted the name we wanted to use three times, like a prayer.  It felt silly, but sacred.  On testing day, I held my breath and waited for the early response kit to tell me my fate.  My family’s fate.  And it did.  And I exhaled.

It’s been several  months since then.  Some months of putting one foot in front of the other, of feeling (at times) that this is such a small problem in the grand scope of things.  And also, such a big loss in the scope of our lives as a family and what we envisioned our family might be.  Of course, this is not the first loss in what we thought our experience might be.   The journey of loss and infertility is, by its very nature, full of little losses along the way.  The loss of intimacy, the loss of expectations, the loss of a sibling taking photos holding a tinier newborn sibling that they’re meeting for the first time, the loss of baby clothes reworn, the loss of beloved names held onto, hoping.

But.

We move forward, we put one foot in front of the other.  We make new choices.  We close some doors, and we re-open others.  The benefit of this not being our first loss is that, unlike when we first started trying to get pregnant six or so years ago, we knew better now.  We knew to anticipate loss, to anticipate folding some self-care into our lives in the wake of what might come of our attempt at a sibling for our daughter.  To not blame ourselves.  To not think, but what if we did X or Y.  What if I’d done acupuncture the way I did before our first IVF?  What if we hadn’t been stressed by other outside factors at the time?  What if, what if, what if…  But you can’t.  You can’t let yourself go down every rabbit trail of what-if, because there are no answers at the end of the trail.  It leads only to wild, tangled shrubs, dark forests, knotted branches that catch you and hold you fast.  Nothing good lies at the end.  There is no wonderland down the rabbit holes you can fall into if you let yourself.

I know this final piece of the travelogue was overdue, and likely people forgot about the first two parts by now.  But I felt like this closure was needed — this final cap to the journey.  Or maybe, not a cap, so much as a fork in the road.  We’re still traveling, still moving forward with our lives.  Now, I run more baths. I read books. We watch a new show together that makes us laugh. We buy too much pie, eat too much cheese, but we are making room for being kind to ourselves as we pick ourselves up and move on.  We make plans for a family trip that is fun-based, not medical.  We take steps towards what our lives might look like another way, another day.  Which is to say, we keep living.  I put fresh flowers in a vase on the table.  I exhale.