After three years of infertility and endless cycles ending in heartbreak, I started to question my purpose and path forward. My husband and I never had a solid reason why we couldn’t get pregnant. Our diagnosis was “unexplained”. I heavily internalized this diagnosis to mean that I was to blame. Without a direct cause to pin our infertility on-without anything to fight against, I fought against myself. I grew up knowing that my grandma experienced infertility. She and my grandfather tried for six years to get pregnant. They eventually adopted their first child, my aunt, and a few years after her my grandma was pregnant with my mom. I was always aware of infertility . As a result, I never had the blind expectation that getting pregnant would be easy. In fact, I always had what felt like a gut feeling that it would be difficult. It’s funny how the mind works sometimes. As my own experience with infertility played out, that gut feeling that I hoped would never be true, became truer and truer each month. I even started to question whether or not I’d subconsciously manifested this reality for myself. I’m not one to put too much stock in things like manifestation, especially when it comes to health outcomes, but in my darkest hours, I’d believe that I’d caused my infertility. I spent hours upon hours in my head trying to somehow reverse what I believed I’d caused for myself.

I was questioning everything during this time in my life. What would I do if I could never be a mom? How was I going to have purpose in my life? What does it mean about my relationship to my body if I can’t manage to do the thing that’s supposedly the “most natural thing a woman can do.” How is my femininity tied to my ability to get pregnant and how does that effect my sexual desire? Did I really even want to be a mother, or did our culture portray motherhood as the only real path to happiness and self-fulfillment? Even if I really wanted it, what lengths was I ready to go to be a mom? Was I prepared to continue sacrificing my mental health, our financial stability, my marriage, our sex life and my physical health? How far could I stretch before I broke? I didn’t want to find out. We decided to press pause for a while and reevaluate.

In the months leading up to our pause in trying to conceive, I had a couple of memorable melt-downs. I remember crying and telling my husband that it felt like we were just constantly swimming upstream, chasing something that was never going to happen. He reminded me that salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs. It was the exact right thing to say at the exact right moment, which if I’m being honest was not the case most of the time. He never experienced the acuity of pain like I did and as a result his highs and lows weren’t nearly as intense as mine. One time, shortly after we’d moved into a new house, in the phase where everything is still chaotic and things haven’t yet found their home, there was a rocking horse “incident”. Years prior, I’d purchased this cool wooden rocking horse at a thrift store with the hope that I’d refinish it for our future child. This rocking horse moved with us at least three times. During this move, it was put at the top of the stairs on the landing until we figured out where it would go. It was a representation of living in a painful liminal space, not knowing what the future would hold or if I’d ever have a room to put it in. This damn rocking horse sat at the top of the stairs for months and we’d walk past it multiple times a day, until one day I cracked. I threw myself on the floor sobbing and screaming. My husband came running upstairs looking confused, scared and pale, and asked what was wrong. I pointed at the rocking horse, still sobbing, saying “I can’t do this anymore”. I couldn’t communicate in that moment what I was feeling. I was overwhelmed with grief and just said “GET RID OF THE HORSE!” My husband, frantic to help me, said OK, I’ll go throw it away. I said NO, DON’T THROW IT AWAY! He ran downstairs and a couple of minutes later he returned with a giant moving blanket which he flung over the rocking horse like he was trying to smother an open flame. He didn’t move it, or throw it away, he just covered it up. I’m laughing now as i write this, but 10 years have passed since that day, so I see it now with different eyes.

Shortly after we agreed to take a pause on trying to conceive, I decided that I wanted to go back to school. It had been a goal of mine for years to study philosophy and I was ready to pour myself into something new. I needed a win after so many months of continual loss. A year into my study, I took a class called The Philosophy of Sex & Love and it completely changed the trajectory of my life. I felt like I was finally swimming with the current instead of against it. That class fundamentally challenged the way I thought about sex, sexuality, desire, bodies and pleasure. It taught me to think critically about the meaning we ascribe to sex and intimacy, and to challenge the cultural narratives about what female sexual desire is and what we are taught to believe about how it should operate. Studying philosophy, and later honing in my research on the philosophy of sex, helped me tremendously to make sense of my own infertility. After all, sex, body image, femininity/masculinity and meaning-making are all inherently tied to procreation. Ever since then knew it was part of my purpose to help people navigate their way through the sexual impacts of infertility.