June is World Infertility Awareness Month, a month dedicated to breaking the stigma around a public health issue that touches approximately 1 in 6 adults globally. If you found your way here in the middle of your own journey, I want you to know this post was written with you in mind. Pull up a chair. I see you. I really, truly see you.
It Started With Pain I Couldn’t Ignore
I had never been someone who struggled with painful periods. So when severe cramping started showing up with my cycle — the kind that doubled me over, the kind that made normal life feel impossible — I knew deep down that something wasn’t right.
After multiple ultrasounds, I got an answer I wasn’t prepared for: a large endometrioma on my left ovary, strongly indicative of Stage 4 endometriosis.
Stage 4. The most advanced. And I had no idea it was quietly happening inside my body, stealing from me before I even knew there was something to lose.
At the time, I was freshly engaged to my now-husband, Matt. He was my longtime love, my person, the man I had dreamed of building a family with. We weren’t even married yet. Suddenly, we were sitting in a doctor’s office having conversations about fertility preservation. It felt surreal. It felt scary. But we made the decision quickly: we were going to fight for our future family. Whatever fertility I had left, we were going to protect it with everything we had.
The Retrieval, The Wait, and a Very Irish Miracle
In February 2023, we did our egg retrieval. If you’ve been through one, you already know what that season costs you. The pre-dawn alarm clocks for monitoring appointments when the rest of the world is still asleep. The injections you learn to give yourself like it’s just a normal part of your day. The bloating, the discomfort, the emotional exhaustion of holding hope and fear in equal measure. You pour everything you have into something with absolutely no guaranteed outcome. You give your whole self and then… you wait.
The waiting is its own kind of hard. Anyone who’s been through IVF knows that waiting is never just waiting. It is hoping and bargaining and praying and trying not to google things you shouldn’t google at two in the morning.
We got our embryo count on Saint Patrick’s Day. I will never forget where I was at or how my heart felt in that moment. There’s something about receiving life-changing news on a holiday, no matter how silly it is. It imprints itself on you permanently. We had embryos. We had hope. We had something tangible and real to hold onto in the middle of so much uncertainty.
(Want to know more about what retrieval was actually like? I wrote a full post on it — I’ll link it here!)
God Had Other Plans (As He Always Does)
We decided to transfer our first embryo right before our July 2023 wedding. I had this tender little picture in my head: maybe I’d walk into marriage already carrying our baby. Maybe our first chapter as husband and wife would begin with a secret miracle only we knew about.
But then I got COVID during the prep cycle. Transfer postponed.
I remember the deflation of that moment more than I remember the sickness itself. After everything — the diagnosis that knocked the wind out of me, the retrieval that asked so much of my body, the waiting that asked so much of my heart — I just wanted something to finally go right. That’s IVF for you. Still, I wanted to feel like we were moving forward instead of being held in place again.
But God had a different timeline than I did. He tends to do that… a lot. I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that His redirects are never without purpose!
So we pivoted. We celebrated our wedding with full hearts. We went on our European honeymoon and let ourselves just be newlyweds for a little while. And then we came home in September 2023, took a breath, and transferred our little embryo that could.
And it worked.
Our son, Gem, was born in May 2024. And I want you to know that when I held him for the first time, every hard thing that had come before him collapsed into that moment. Every early morning. Every injection. Every postponed plan. Every prayer that felt like it disappeared into the ceiling. It was all worth it. Every single piece of it.
The Loss No One Prepares You For
I wish I could tell you the story ends there, wrapped up neatly with our newest child in my arms and nothing but smooth road ahead. But I think you already know — if you’ve been in this world for any length of time — that infertility stories rarely tie up that cleanly.
In September 2025, we transferred again. We were hopeful. We were excited. We had walked through fire before and come out the other side holding our miracle boy. We knew it could work. We had proof that it could work.
And then on October 15th, 2025, we lost her.
October 15th is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, a globally recognized day set aside to honor families who have walked through miscarriage, stillbirth, ectopic pregnancy, SIDS, and other infant losses. The fact that we lost Kennedy on that day is something I still sit with. Irony doesn’t feel like a big enough word. It felt less like a coincidence and more like God saying: I see her. She is known. She matters.
Grief after infertility is its own complicated thing. You fought so hard to get there. You understand, maybe more than most, exactly what a miracle pregnancy is. Somehow that knowledge makes the loss heavier, not lighter. Because you knew. You knew what you had. You knew what you were losing.
The months that followed have held more layers than I expected. Grief and miscarriage and IVF don’t process in a straight line. They don’t follow a schedule or respect your other responsibilities or wait until you have space to feel all the things. Grief shows up at the grocery store and in the quiet moments after your other children go to sleep and on ordinary Tuesdays when nothing should be wrong but everything feels heavy. Processing an IVF miscarriage while also holding gratitude for the living IVF miracle in your arms is one of the more complicated emotional spaces I’ve ever occupied. Some days, I did it with grace. Most days, though, I just did it.
Kennedy Rose is and will forever be woven into our family story. I wouldn’t have it any other way; she changed me. She is changing me still.
What Nobody Tells You About IVF
The hardest part of this journey isn’t the needles, though those are hard. It isn’t the procedures or the two-week waits or the hormone swings that make you feel like a stranger in your own body. The hardest part, and quite frankly the part I think deserves to be said out loud more often, is the uncertainty.
IVF asks you to put your whole life on hold, over and over again, and for what? An outcome that is never, ever promised to you. A retrieval doesn’t guarantee embryos. Embryos don’t guarantee a transfer. A transfer doesn’t guarantee a pregnancy. A pregnancy does not guarantee a live birth. At every single stage, there is another threshold, another unknown, another place where the floor could drop out from under you at a moment’s notice.
And the world doesn’t always understand that. People say things like just stay positive and it’ll happen when it’s meant to with the very best intentions, and sometimes those words land like a bruise on already tender skin. Because you know the statistics. You’ve read the forums at midnight. You understand in your bones that love and hope and positive thinking are not the variables that determine the outcome. And, honestly? That right there is a particular kind of grief all on its own!
If you are in the middle of that uncertainty right now, I want to say something to you directly: what you are feeling is real. The weight of not knowing is real. The grief of every setback is real. And you are not alone in any of it, not for a single moment.
Where We Are Now
We are in a season of holding it all at once — joy for Gem, grief for Kennedy, and a quiet, tender hope as we think about what comes next. Wanting to try again while still carrying everything Kennedy means to us. It’s not a simple feeling. It’s not a clean one. But I think that’s what this journey does — it teaches you to hold space for more than one thing at a time. Grief alongside hope. Heartbreak alongside gratitude. Loss alongside love.
We are in a season of holding it all at once. Joy for our son, who fills our home with noise and wonder and the particular chaos that only a toddler can create. Grief for our daughter, who is loved and remembered and spoken about in our home because she deserves to be. And a quiet, tender, carefully held hope as we think about what comes next: wanting to try again while still carrying everything she means to us.
It isn’t a simple feeling. It isn’t a clean one. Some days hope feels close and warm and real. Other days it feels like something I have to choose deliberately, like picking it up off the floor and holding it even when my hands are tired.
I don’t have a tidy ending to offer you, because I’m still in the middle of my own journey. But I have this: I believe there is beauty waiting in the in-between. I believe the hard seasons are not wasted, even when they feel like they are. And I believe, with everything I have, that your story is not over. God’s not done; I know that to be absolute!
To the Women in the Trenches
If you are in a waiting room for a morning monitoring appointment right now, or recovering from a retrieval, or staring at a negative test in a bathroom with the door locked, or grieving a loss you haven’t found the words to tell people about yet… I wrote this next section just for you.
I won’t promise you everything works out the way you planned, because my story is proof that it often doesn’t. Plans get postponed. Losses happen that no one warned you to prepare for. Timelines get rewritten by hands that aren’t yours.
But I will tell you that hope is still allowed to exist alongside all of that! Grief and joy really can live in the same heart at the same time. I know because I am living proof. That version of you who is exhausted and scared and still showing up anyway? She is one of the bravest people I know!
Hold on, sweet friend. You are seen. You are not alone. And your story is still being written.
No Comments