I don’t write much anymore, mostly because I don’t know where we are in this thing.

It’s been 5 years since I had surgery and was kindly kicked out of the fertility games. It was a relief, to be real. I don’t think either one of us would have said no to one more try, one more cycle, one more procedure, one more something that would cost emotional, physical, and financial pain we couldn’t spare.

My body said no, as it loves to do. It’s always forgetting it’s job is to create new life, not to destroy the one I’m living.

So, yes, getting kicked out of fertility treatments was both wonderful and horrible, but at least we had a decision.

The loss was there, too, that we had to grieve. The brokenness in the dream that cannot become, in the body that will not create.

We learned about other ways to build a family. They are born of loss and brokenness, too, of heartache and uncertainty that I just don’t know if I can survive. The dark times aren’t so far that they don’t sneak in to remind us of their force. We cannot do that again. We wouldn’t survive it twice. Even with the promise I made, the one I swore with my whole heart, even that couldn’t keep us a second time.

So we sit in the brokenness. We find joy in our days, we float in and out of maybes and what ifs, we love fiercely and truly laugh again. But it is only in pieces. Even the purest joy isn’t whole. It can’t be, because of the brokenness. Sometimes we stop in bliss and stay a while. The missing is farther away then, but it doesn’t last. The missing finds its way back in to lead us back to broken.

But we go forward. In this brokenness, we actually move forward somehow, toward something uncertain with guarded hearts and pieces of maybes in our pockets.