National Infertility Awareness Week: Three Kids, Eight Years, and a Lot of Feelings

It's National Infertility Awareness Week, which means I've been thinking a lot about the version of me who sat in a fertility clinic waiting room at 28 — college-educated, completely blindsided — and learned for the first time that you actually have to ovulate to get pregnant. I wish that were a joke. It is not even a little bit a joke.

That appointment eventually led to a PCOS diagnosis, a string of failed IUIs, and a path to IVF that took longer and hurt more than I'd let myself imagine. My twins arrived after all of it, but a high-risk pregnancy made sure I never quite exhaled: at 27 weeks, my cervix shortened overnight, and what had been a regular Tuesday turned into hospital bed rest and breath I held for weeks.

My third was a different kind of hard: two miscarriages, several failed transfers, and one last cycle where we'd already talked through what "done" would look like if it didn't work. He just turned sixteen months, which still feels a little impossible to say out loud.

I share all of this because 1 in 6 people will experience infertility in their lifetime, and most of them will do it in waiting rooms and two-week waits and late-night searches that never quite say the thing they actually need to hear. The information exists, but the community, the language, the permission to fall apart and still keep going? That part is harder to find.

That's the whole reason Rescripted exists, and my inbox is always open.