There are losses in life that are visible, and there are losses that are invisible. This one feels like both. We didn't lose a child we held in our arms, but we lost the expectation of children conceived through our love. We lost the ease of a future we had always assumed. We lost something deeply intimate and deeply personal.

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back This is the truth infertility forces us to face: we can’t go back. We can’t return to who we were before the diagnosis, before the loss, before the treatments, before the years of waiting. That version of ourselves—the one who believed our bodies would cooperate, who thought motherhood was just a matter of timing, who hadn’t yet learned what it means to grieve something that never was—she’s gone.

Year seven looks nothing like I was told it would. By now, according to the theology I grew up with, this should be over. God should have answered. His timing should have been perfect. The story should have reached its redemptive conclusion: the testimony with the happy ending where I stand up in church and declare how faithful God was through our infertility journey, baby in my arms. Instead, I'm staring down the reality that I'm aging out. That the door to adoption has slam