Trying to Have a Baby Is the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done

Nobody tells you the truth about infertility grief. They tell you it might take time. They say “it’ll happen when it’s supposed to,” like it’s a scheduling issue and not the thing keeping you up at night doing math on cycles and ages and money. Nobody sits you down and says: five years from now, you will still be doing this. You will still be depleted in ways you don’t have good words for. You will still be reaching for God some nights and finding your hand closing around nothing.

I’m five years into this, and the infertility grief that comes with it has been the quietest, heaviest part. So let me say the thing out loud that I think most of us are too ashamed to admit: trying to have a baby is the hardest thing I have ever done. Not the most fulfilling eventually, not the most meaningful someday. The hardest. Right now, today, still. And I don’t see the finish line.

I Have Tried Everything. I Mean Everything.

I’ve moved my body. I’ve changed what I eat. I’ve had the surgery. I’ve read every forum thread and followed every strange piece of internet folklore, McDonald’s fries, Brazil nuts, all of it, because when you want something this badly, you will try the things that make no scientific sense right alongside the things your doctor actually prescribes. I used to worry about getting embryos at all. Now the embryos come, and they still don’t stick. That’s a different kind of grief than the one I braced myself for, the wondering if my body can even start this, and now the wondering why it won’t finish it.

I have a medical issue underneath all of this that I’m not ready to talk about in detail, mostly because I don’t have answers for it myself yet. I’m learning that “I don’t know” is allowed to be part of the story too, even when it’s the part people want to skip past to get to the resolution.

The Body Keeps the Score

Here’s a sentence I don’t hear anyone say out loud: I am a woman, and my body will not cooperate. Nobody talks about that specific ache of infertility, being a woman whose body isn’t doing the one thing it was supposedly built to do, and having no one around you who understands what that does to your sense of yourself. I have never, not once in my life, seen a positive pregnancy test. Not one. That’s not a sentence I say for sympathy. It’s just true, and it’s the specific shape of my exhaustion that most people trying to comfort me don’t actually know how to sit with.

Infertility Grief: Good, Until Suddenly I’m Not

Most days I am fine. Genuinely. I laugh, I work, I show up for my life, and I mean it. And then some days, without much warning, infertility grief catches up to me at once, the trying, the waiting, the not knowing, the doing everything right and still ending up here, and I need an hour of crying it out just to survive my own body for a little while. I had real plans for this year. A window I was counting on, circled, built hope around. It didn’t happen.

I’m still standing in the space where that plan used to be, figuring out what to do with the room it left behind.

I didn’t have a word for this grief for a long time. It turns out there is one: disenfranchised grief, loss that the world doesn’t fully recognize because there was no funeral, no clear before-and-after, nothing anyone can point to and say “I’m sorry for your loss” about. A systematic review of women undergoing infertility treatment found depression, despair, and prolonged grief among the most commonly reported responses, which tells me I am not being dramatic. I am responding the way a lot of women do. I’m grieving a child I’ve never met, a due date that never existed, a version of this year I had genuinely built hope around. That’s real infertility grief. It just doesn’t come with a name most people know to offer you.

The Spiritual Part Nobody Warns You About

I can’t hear from the Lord right now. I don’t know if that’s infertility grief, or exhaustion, or something else entirely, and I’ve stopped trying to diagnose it. I just know the prayers that used to come easily now feel like a language I’m relearning, especially the ones asking for the one thing that still hasn’t come. I used to think that silence meant something was wrong with me. Now I think it might just mean I’m human, in a season of infertility grief that’s genuinely hard to hear anything through.

Some days I have every ounce of fight left in me. Other days that fight is the only thing I’ve got, no hope riding alongside it, just grit, gritting my teeth and showing up anyway because stopping isn’t a real option either. And some days I am completely lost, no plan, no next step, just lost. All three of those are true. I’m learning they can be true in the same week, sometimes the same hour, without either one canceling the other out.

Why I’m Carrying Infertility Grief Mostly Alone

I don’t want to talk to most people about this, and I’ve made peace with that. Not because I don’t have people who love me. I do. But because I know what happens when I open this up to a room, someone means well and says the wrong thing anyway, the “just relax,” the “have you tried,” the kind of thing our own post on what not to say to someone with infertility exists to prevent, the advice that costs them nothing and costs me an afternoon of recovering from it. My uterus is not a group project. I don’t need a committee. I need the handful of people who know how to just be there, and I’ve learned to keep the rest of my infertility grief close, not out of shame, but out of self-protection.

Part of it, too, is that I just don’t have news. Month after month, there’s nothing new to report, and there’s only so many times you can tell people “still nothing” before it starts to feel like you’re performing your own disappointment for an audience. So mostly, I don’t. I carry it quietly, and I let people believe I’m fine, because most days, I actually am, right up until I’m not.

My Husband Is Carrying Infertility Grief Too

His support has meant everything, more than I think he even knows. But I see his heart break in this too, quietly, the way men are so often taught to carry things. This is his disappointment as much as mine, the fear that he won’t get to be a father the way he’s hoped, and it is not an easy thing to hand him another negative test result, to watch his face do the thing it does for half a second before he composes himself for my sake. This kind man deserves this too. Not just the child, someday, but the acknowledgment now that his grief is real and running alongside mine, not behind it. If the two of you are working on staying connected through this, choosing each other during infertility says it better than I can.

I think transparency matters here, with him and with myself. Not performing strength I don’t have, and not hiding the why behind how tired I am. The why matters. It’s not just exhaustion for its own sake. It’s exhaustion in service of something we both want so badly, and naming that keeps us on the same side of it instead of just two people quietly enduring in the same house.

A Club Membership I Wish No One Was Part Of

I am grateful, genuinely, that we have more options than the women who came before us. That’s not lost on me. But I also know infertility is a club membership I wish no one had to hold. Today I am crying, not just for myself, but for every mom in waiting reading this right now, wherever she is in her own version of this. You are not alone.

If you need somewhere to put this down, RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association runs a free helpline at (866) 668-2566, and our post on coping with infertility is a gentle place to start.

If You’re Living Infertility Grief Too

I don’t know your specific version of this. Maybe you’ve tried everything too, the medical and the strange internet remedies both. Maybe you’ve never seen a positive test either, or you’ve seen too many that didn’t hold. Maybe you have a medical answer you’re still waiting on, or no answer at all, and you’re tired of people needing you to explain it before they’ll sit with you in it. Wherever you are in your own infertility grief, hear this the way I need to hear it too: you are not failing by being exhausted. You are not less faithful for the silence you’re sitting in right now. You are not less of a woman because your body hasn’t done the thing yet, or the thing you were told it would just do.

You are doing the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Say that to yourself today, out loud if you have to. And you are still here, still trying, still hoping for a child who doesn’t know yet what it’s already costing you to want them this much. That’s not weakness. That has never once been weakness. That is the whole quiet, unglamorous shape of love, given before there’s even someone here yet to receive it.

If infertility grief is what you’re carrying today: you are seen. You are not alone in this, even on the days it feels like you are.

Update: Two Weeks Later

It has been two weeks since I wrote this, and I’m doing what I keep doing: catching my breath, looking at my options, and trying to do some things differently, even with infertility grief still sitting beside me. I don’t have big news. What I do have is a few books that made me cry like a baby and reminded me, again, that I am not alone. Sometimes you just need to know that.

Resources for Infertility Grief on the Hard Days

Books That Helped Me Feel Less Alone

All four of these are picture books. No, you are not too old for them. A few gentle pages can say what an hour of explaining never could.

• The Empty Nest by Jared Walker. Read this when you want company in the waiting, not a pep talk. Two ducks build a nest and wait for eggs that never hatch while the families around them grow. Jared Walker wrote it for his wife after years of infertility and miscarriage, and it does not pretend the story ends neatly.
• To the Moon and Back for You by Emilia Bechrakis Serhant. Read this when you need hope. Serhant wrote it out of her own difficulty conceiving and her experience with IVF, and it follows families of every shape and size crossing deserts and climbing mountains to find their miracle babies.
• We Waited for You by Cindy Chupack. Read this when you want the waiting named out loud. The rhyming text speaks to watching everyone around you have a baby while you wait, and it shows many paths to becoming a family. It ends with a child arriving, which can be a lot on a hard day, so choose your moment.
• Embie, The Lucky Embryo That Could by Sabine Hilligardt. Read this when you want IVF explained gently. It follows a cheerful embryo named Embie through the basic steps, from egg retrieval to embryo transfer. This is the Mom+Dad IVF edition of a series that also covers other family structures.

If someone in your life keeps asking how they can help, handing them a short picture book can say what you cannot. Here is the link I use for these books.

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People Who Understand

• RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association runs a free helpline at (866) 668-2566 and connects women to peer support groups across the country.
• Postpartum Support International also supports people through infertility and pregnancy loss, and you can call or text (800) 944-4773.
• A licensed counselor who understands infertility grief, so you never have to explain this loss from scratch.

Wherever you are in your infertility grief, you are not alone.

Read More

• Coping with Infertility: Emotional Insights and Support
• What Not to Say to Someone With Infertility
• Choosing Each Other During Infertility: 9 Honest Truths
• Multiple IVF Failures
• Supporting Women with Infertility on Mother’s Day

A Note on Emotional Support: This post is a personal reflection, not medical or mental health advice. If infertility grief ever feels like more than you can carry alone, please reach out to a licensed counselor or one of the support organizations above.