Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

You’re so young, yet you’re running out of time. You’re so young, until you’re not. Until you labor over getting the timing just right, and realize that Life doesn’t work that way. Until you feel your proverbial biological clock ticking like a time bomb in utero.

You’re so young, unless you want children.

Infertility is a secret word – a whisper between women trying to be decent – until it’s your word, and suddenly it’s the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. Suddenly, you want to scream it. Over and over and over and over.

Before the big scary “I” word ever looms over you, your expectations are probably akin to the famous intro of the movie Up: you meet a boy, fall in love, receive devastating news from a heartfelt doctor, and you make the best of the rest of your life with the love of your life, just a little emptier than planned.

But no one tells you that it can be a word casually thrown around between potential diagnoses underplayed by a tired surgeon. No one tells you that different opinions will rattle around in your periphery 24/7 – one doctor will tell you to give up and have a hysterectomy while another laughs at the prospect of anything being wrong at all. No one tells you that the word may never come up. Not directly. You figure it out, slowly, after hospital visits and failed attempts and a body that feels 30 years its senior. No one warns you that it’s rarely a one-and-done diagnosis, but a long rollercoaster until something either works, or you get off the ride. You might have infertility or you might have INFERTILITY. Wait and see.

You expect to decide, in equal measures of excitement and terror, to have a baby and then you just…have one. 9 or so months later. Maybe, more likely, it just happens. Uh-oh, we’re going to have a baby, and then you figure it out all the same. But sometimes, a uterus goes from being just a body part to morphing into your biggest enemy. How dare you backstab me now? We were supposed to work on this thing together.

How did I get stuck with this angry, angsty, broken thing, when everyone around me got perfectly normal, happy, cooperative bellies?

The reality is that no one wants to hear about it, because it’s one of those uncomfortable topics in the grander societal sense. Taboo, or whatever. It’s not anyone else’s fault that it feels wrong or dirty or too hard to navigate. It just exists, simply. Even though it’s the farthest thing from simple.

I’ve realized that time heals the wound for everyone else. Again, it’s not their fault. What else is there to say? Let’s move on, collectively, because it’s uncomfortable to remember awful things. And it is awful. And you are uncomfortable and I am uncomfortable and it’s better to just not go there. So, we play pretend. Or, I do, mostly.

I pretend not to mind that I don’t get wished a happy Mother’s Day anymore, because it really is a bummer. Loss, no matter how infinitesimal, sticks to your insides and just stays there. Forever. I pretend not to mind when mothers complain about their children, because they’re not living my life. Everyone should be able to complain, just as I can think, “But what a beautiful thing you have.” I pretend not to mind when my own girlhood disappears, because everyone else’s went straight toward their children. That’s the way the world works, but damn, it’s lonely. And damn, it makes you feel like an ant as mothers watch you with either pity or jealousy. I live in a world where I get to be selfish and I get to do whatever I want, except the one thing I really, really want. So on, I pretend not to mind as my friends lose interest in me, because I am no longer interesting on my own. With no child at my hip, my likes and my quirks and my own self are simply not enough. I wonder if they ever were, or if we were all playing a game, waiting for the appropriate childbearing years in order to become interesting to one another. But I was interested, and I miss being on the same playing field. I miss commonality. Community less tied to the one thing I am incapable of, temporary or not.

A year ago, I was in the hospital. And a year ago, I thought I’d have my own health disaster wrapped up in a neat bow. Not so much fixed, but dealt with. Handled enough to move on and join the kid club. But so quickly does that door start to close. So quickly, does everyone rush inside. So quickly, do you resign yourself to watching it close, imagining a life on this side, forever.

It’s still happy, just a little emptier than you planned.