Infertility

Most grief is for something that happened. This grief is for something that keeps not happening, which means it never gets to finish. Each cycle closes with a loss and opens with a requirement to hope again.

People around you often do not know, or do not know what to say, so you carry appointments, injections, and results in silence while performing normal at work and at family dinners.

Therapy gives the monthly grief a place to land, so it stops accumulating silently in the background of everything else.

When your body will not do the thing it is supposedly built to do, the relationship with it changes. It becomes a project, a problem, a set of data. Many people describe feeling betrayed by it, and then guilty for feeling that.

The medical process intensifies this. Your most private life becomes scheduled, measured, and discussed across a desk, and your sense of yourself as a person rather than a patient thins out.

We work on separating your worth from your body's compliance, and on staying a whole person inside a process that constantly reduces you to a result.

The pregnancy announcement that arrives the week of your own bad news. The baby shower you cannot attend without paying for it for days. The casual question about when you are planning kids.

None of these people are cruel. That is almost worse, because there is no one to be angry at, only a pain you have to keep swallowing in public.

You do not have to perform happiness here. Ambivalence, envy, and rage at people you love are all allowed in the room, and saying them out loud is usually what makes them survivable.