The Feeling

It is a quiet grief.

Not the kind that arrives with casseroles and sympathy cards.
Not the kind the world pauses for.

It lives in bathrooms with negative tests.
In calendar apps marked with hope and then erased.
In the space between “maybe” and “not this month.”

Infertility is a waiting room that never calls your name.

It is learning the language of hormones and statistics when all you wanted was a heartbeat. It is holding your breath at every prick, every symptom, every delayed cycle, bargaining with a future that keeps slipping just out of reach.

And the silence is its own weight.

You go to work.
You attend baby showers.
You smile at pregnancy announcements.
You say, “I’m so happy for you,” and mean it, and also feel something inside you fracture.

There is no socially acceptable script for the ache that follows.

The grief is invisible because there was no funeral.
No birth certificate.
Sometimes not even a name.

Just possibility.
And the loss of it.

Infertility endured in silence becomes layered:

The loss of a child who never came.

The loss of the timeline you imagined.

The loss of ease in your own body.

The loss of who you were before this began.

You start to measure time differently. 
In cycles. In appointments. In two-week waits.
Hope becomes something you ration carefully, too much of it hurts.

And then there’s the body.

The body that feels like it has betrayed you.
The body that once felt neutral, now interrogated.
Prodded. Tested. Analyzed.

It becomes a site of suspicion instead of trust.

There’s a particular loneliness in carrying a grief that doesn’t show on your face.

You learn to speak about it carefully, if at all. You calculate who can handle the truth and who cannot. You shrink the story to make other people comfortable.

Sometimes you stop telling it altogether.

And yet, beneath the silence, there is endurance.

Appointments attended.
Injections given.
Prayers whispered.
Money saved.
Hope rebuilt from nothing, again and again.

There is a strength here that is rarely named.

Infertility is not only absence. It is relentless love with nowhere to land. It is a heart prepared to mother, suspended in waiting.

The silence does not mean the struggle was small.
It means it was carried privately.
Bravely.
Often without witness.

And perhaps what hurts most is not only the loss, but how quietly it was endured.