Talking About Where You've Been Is The First Step

I disappeared.

Not all at once. There wasn't a moment when I decided I was going to stop posting or stop showing up or quietly remove myself from parts of my life. It just happened.

And I think I've had such a hard time coming back because, in order to come back, I need to share where I've been.

I didn't share my fertility journey while I was going through it. Part of that was fear. I was scared of what people would say. I didn't know anyone having a baby on their own, and there wasn't a blueprint I could follow. No one I could look at and think, Oh, this is how you do this.

And honestly, I was incredibly naive. I thought it would take me a year to get pregnant. I had done the testing. I passed everything with flying colors. My body was ready. I was mentally ready. I had made the decision. I was there.

Except I didn't get pregnant.

And then a year passed and then two more.

Fertility treatment has this strange way of reorganizing your entire life around the possibility of something happening. You start the month counting days. You make the appointments. You get the bloodwork. You do the acupuncture. You take the medication. You give yourself the shots. You schedule the IUI or prepare for IVF or whatever that particular month requires of you.

You wait. You hope. You find out it didn't work. And then you start again.

Because what if you take one month off and that's the month your body would have been ready?

I learned a lot during those years, but maybe the biggest lesson was that I had control over almost none of it. And that was incredibly difficult for me.

The process consumed my life, but because I wasn't talking about it publicly, I disappeared.

I had a small group of friends who knew what I was going through. They were there for me. They listened. They supported me. But especially after that first year, I started feeling like I was burdening them with the same story over and over again.

Another appointment. Another procedure. Another hope. Another disappointment.

I knew logically that I wasn't a burden. But emotionally, I felt like one.

Mostly, I was sad. And stressed. And I didn't have any answers. I started to exist in a little bubble while the rest of life continued around me.

And still, I kept going. I checked in with myself constantly: Do I still want this? Is becoming a mother still this important to me? Is everything I'm sacrificing to make this happen worth it?

And the answer kept being yes.

I also knew there was a very real possibility that I could sacrifice all of it and still not become a mother. That's a strange thing to carry. It's mental, physical, financial and spiritual all at once.

And this all changed me completely, inside and out. I'd already come out of the pandemic a different person. Then fertility treatment changed me over and over.

And then I got pregnant.

You'd think that would have been the moment when all the fear disappeared. It wasn't. The stress just changed shape. Because getting pregnant doesn't guarantee you a baby.

When I had my daughter, nothing happened the way I imagined it would. She spent time in the NICU. I was very sick. There was turmoil surrounding her birth that I would continue dealing with long after we left the hospital. That's a story for another day.

But I didn't get the version I'd pictured, where everyone came to meet the baby and I stepped happily back into my life as this new version of myself.

There were beautiful moments. My brother and his family came. Friends stopped by. And those moments meant more to me than I knew how to explain. They also made me realize how much I missed people. How much I missed connection.

Then, seven weeks after having my baby, I was laid off.

Suddenly I wasn't just figuring out how to be someone's mother. I was figuring out how to be someone's mother without a job. How to recover from a birth I hadn't really processed. How to take care of a baby. How to enter a completely different life than the one I thought I was going to have.

And now, here I am. Two years later. Trying to figure out how to come back to a world I loved so much when I'm not the same person who left it.

For a while, I thought I needed to figure out who this new person was first. Then I could write again. And show up the way I longed to. But I'm beginning to realize I might have had it backwards.

I'm a writer. I enjoy being creative. I'm a connector. Those aren't things I need to find my way back to after I figure everything else out. They're part of how I find my way back to myself. And I haven't been nourishing that part of me.

Maybe coming back isn't pretending the last few years didn't happen. Maybe I don't need a perfectly packaged story about what they meant. Maybe the first step is simply telling the truth about where I've been.

So here it is. This is where I've been.

And I think this is me, finding my way back.