Crow and Flame

There are some griefs that the world knows how to hold.

This isn’t one of them.

It’s National Infertility Week, and for a moment, I want to pull this out of the quiet corners and set it in the open. Not polished. Not softened. Just honest.

Because infertility isn’t just a medical term.
It’s not just a diagnosis, a statistic, or a timeline of appointments and outcomes.

It’s a lived experience.
It’s layered.
It’s invisible—until suddenly, it isn’t.

Sometimes I have a hard time just being around babies.

And that sentence alone carries more contradiction than most people expect.

I love them.
I love the weight of them in my arms, the warmth, the way they curl into you like they’ve always belonged there. I want to soak up every second—the tiny fingers, the sleepy breaths, the softness that feels almost sacred.

I want all the cuddles.

And still…
there’s a quiet fracture that runs underneath it all.

A small, tender part of my heart that aches while I’m smiling.
A flicker of something that feels like grief, even in the presence of something so full of life.

It’s not resentment.
It’s not bitterness.
It’s not a lack of love.

It’s longing.

And longing has a way of coexisting with joy in the most disorienting ways.

You can be fully present in a moment and still feel the absence of another life you imagined standing beside it.

That’s the part people don’t always see.

Infertility isn’t just about what isn’t there.
It’s about the constant awareness of it.

It’s the way conversations shift the air in a room.

It’s hearing people talk about all the things they can’t do because of their kids—
how exhausted they are, how limited they feel, how they miss their freedom—

and then watching their eyes turn toward you with something that looks like sympathy wrapped in misunderstanding.

“You’re lucky.”
“At least you don’t have to deal with this.”
“You should be grateful.”

And there’s a moment—every time—where something inside you stiffens.

Grateful for what?

For the empty space where something was supposed to grow?
For the silence where there should have been noise?
For the absence of a life you would have rearranged everything to hold?

People often equate difficulty with regret, and ease with gratitude.
But they forget that what feels like a burden to one person might be the very thing another is grieving.

That perspective gap can feel isolating.

Because how do you explain that you would choose the sleepless nights?
The chaos?
The exhaustion they’re desperate to vent about?

How do you say, without sounding ungrateful or out of place,
I would take that life in a heartbeat.

So instead, a lot of the time, you don’t say anything at all.

You nod.
You listen.
You carry it quietly.

And then there’s miscarriage.

A word we say quickly, as if brevity makes it easier to hold.

But miscarriage isn’t just a moment.
It isn’t just a loss contained to a single event.

It’s an unraveling.

The physical pain… people tend to acknowledge that part more easily.
There’s a beginning, a middle, an end. The body goes through something intense, and eventually, it begins to heal.

But the emotional pain doesn’t follow that same pattern.

It doesn’t resolve neatly.
It doesn’t have a clear endpoint.

Because what you’re grieving isn’t just what happened—
it’s everything that was supposed to happen next.

It’s the future you started building the second you knew.
The quiet calculations, the imagined milestones, the subtle shift in how you saw your life unfolding.

And then suddenly… that entire timeline disappears.

But your mind doesn’t just erase it.

It lingers.

In dates that pass like ghosts—
due dates that come and go without acknowledgment.

In the moments you catch yourself thinking, I would have been…
before the sentence trails off into something you don’t say out loud.

In the way your body remembers, even when the world has moved on.

There is something uniquely heavy about grieving a life that many people never got the chance to know existed.

There are no shared memories to reminisce over.
No photographs.
No stories others can hold with you.

Just you.

And what you felt.
And what you knew, even if only for a moment.

That makes it a quiet grief—but not a small one.

If anything, the silence around it makes it heavier.

Because you’re often left holding something profound in spaces that don’t quite know how to receive it.

So you learn to carry it differently.

You tuck it into the background.
You bring it out in safe spaces—if you’re lucky enough to have them.

And sometimes, you write it out.
Like this.

Not for pity.
Not for attention.

But for recognition.

For the simple, human need to have something real be acknowledged as real.

This week isn’t about comparing pain.
It’s not about ranking struggles or deciding who has it worse.

It’s about making space.

For the women and men who are navigating doctor visits, uncertainty, and waiting.
For those who have faced loss in ways that don’t always get named.
For those who show up to baby showers, to family gatherings, to everyday life—
carrying both love and grief in the same breath.

If this is your experience, even in part—

There is nothing wrong with the way you feel.
Not the ache.
Not the anger.
Not the moments of distance or the moments of deep tenderness.

You are allowed to hold all of it.

And if you’ve never walked this road,
if this isn’t a grief you’ve had to name—

then maybe the most powerful thing you can offer isn’t advice, or perspective, or reframing.

Maybe it’s simply this:

Listening without trying to fix it.
Acknowledging without minimizing it.
Sitting beside someone without needing them to make their pain more comfortable for you.

Because sometimes the most profound losses
are the ones that never had the chance to fully exist in the world—

but existed deeply, undeniably,
in someone’s heart.

And that matters.