2019 marks Year 8 in my life dealing with Unexplained Infertility.  First came the miscarriage, then the failed IUI cycles, and eventual successful IVF experience, and finally my beloved daughter, then a failed IVF cycle in 2016.  In 2017 we became a foster family, setting aside IVF etc because we’d used all the frozen embryos we had, and were at a natural closing chapter place in our lives.  It felt like the right choice because I fully believe it was the right choice to make.

But it’s January now, and my life might be starting a new year, but it also feels in many ways like I’m living the same cycles over and over, watching friends build their families the traditional way, while my own life stays with the solo biological child, and other children coming, then maybe going.  I see so many new babies. So many families growing, while I struggle with appointments and court dates and wondering what our family will look like in a year, two years, five, fifteen. It is so hard, sometimes, to not feel this gaping wound pulse with pain.

I wish I had a better thing to say, other than this: that it’s important sometimes to guard your heart against exceptional pain.  For me, that meant stepping away from my mama group for a bit while the feelings of envy and sadness become overwhelming. It means making a new appointment with my therapist to talk about the grief that lingers in my life, despite my attempts to mitigate it.  It means accepting that this grief may be an indelible part of my life, a ribbon running through me that divides the life from before that diagnosis, to after, a gaping chasm of hurt and frustration and…well, being left behind a lot.

It’s easy, too, to think of all those new babies, and not think of the breastfeeding struggles, the supply efforts, the pumping at work, the sleepless nights at home, all the daily hard things that having a baby entails.  I am trying to be gracious to my friends too, even as I wish I could have what they have. That what I want is, at its core, a very hard thing, even when it’s easily obtained. Infertility didn’t get me a painless labor and birth, it didn’t gift me with a perfect milk supply, nights of long uninterrupted sleep, it did not balance the scales in any way during babyhood, and this is also what I’m trying to remind myself these days when I feel like it’s never going to happen (it very well might not).  That even as new mamas have the joy of new babies, it is not without its own set of grief.

Still.

If you feel the weight of emptiness in your arms this year, please know you’re not alone.  I see you. I see the grief you’re holding onto, and rather than try to talk you out of it, because talking someone out of grief is impossible, I’d like to just tell you I see you and your pain and salute you from afar.  Solidarity, sister.