Every parent’s journey, whether they acknowledge it or not, starts with hope and uncertainty.

  • Knowing how to manage emotions is an essential tool for everyone, particularly those on a journey that is defined by unknowns.

  • It's reflexive for us to compare ourselves to those who are in the same life stage. There's no need to suppress comparison, but there is a need to learn how to navigate comparison.

  • It is the single most powerful shift we can make when we become aware of and intentional with our self-talk.

How I learned what support looks like through fertility treatment.

One of my clients started working with me after she had been struggling to get pregnant for more than two years. She was just beginning the IVF process. In one of our sessions, she recounted an experience she had the previous week: she sat at a restaurant table with ~10 of her friends, bracing for the news that she knew - with dread ("and a healthy side of grief" she told me) one of the women at the table would share: her friend was pregnant. And she hadn't even been trying that long. 

My client felt her stomach tighten. She looked down at the table and blinked her eyes rapidly, wanting to be happy for her friend even though she was crushed.

"And then," my client said when she told me what happened. Another friend, the woman sitting beside my client, reached under the table and squeezed her hand. My client paused to make room for her tears in the retelling. "She held my hand for several minutes. And that's how I got through that lunch."

That's the support that all of us need. Make sure you have it. 

My children are in their 20s now, but I'll never forget the path I took to become a parent.

Even all these years later, it's hard to distill my experience and my journey into this text. It involved unfathomable loss, choices that clashed with some values that I used to hold dear, surgery, privilege, resources, family near and far, new friends, physicians, the full spectrum of emotion, luck, humility, a loss of who I knew myself to be and who I thought I'd become, and blind faith in embracing who I was and who my children and family would become.

It's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure. So if you've stumbled through a doorway marked "Infertility," know that you're not alone. There are many of us standing here with you. 

I've worked with many clients in this era of their lives.

And every one of them broke my heart. And healed it.

That doesn't mean that their experiences were all meant for celebration. It means that they walked, trudged, crawled, wept with snot running down their faces, raised their arms in triumph, and bowed their heads in guttural cries. It means that the process meant as much as the outcome. Because it had to. The process is where our power lies.