The day I stopped trying

and other thoughts on chapters ending

I am four years out from the decision to stop trying to have babies. For good.

I am also four years out from my first encounter with Covid. Both of these things happened in the same week. I didn’t know that the reason I fell in the garden was because Covid was settling into my body. I slipped. Instead of getting back up, I lay there on a grey October day and looked at the sky. In that exact moment, I knew that I was done. A long journey was over.

This is how I think about this now. It might have happened differently , a glacial realisation, five years in the making and not making. Sometimes we make a decision because we don’t make a decision. Not committing to something is really committing to something else.

I often work with people who are on the cusp of moving into new fertility territory, stopping something, beginning something else.

Cusps of moving into the world of assisted conception

Cusps of trying something new that might be the answer

Cusps of moving into new landscapes of donor conception, adoption, surrogacy.

Cusps of saying goodbye to embryos.

Cusps of stopping trying altogether.

And here’s what they ask me. How will I know when it’s time to…

I can’t have the answer. But I can hold space to explore it carefully….

What I do know, is that when we seek to choose our next direction, we are entangled in a dance with grief and desire. One of them will win. We grieve when something is over - desire is the siren that calls us down new avenues. We will decide (or decide to not decide). And that doesn’t have to be today. But the day will come when we are on a different page.

What can we do to honour moving ourselves into new territory or acknowledge we aren’t ready to move anywhere? Fires can be lit. A bath can be made sacred and significant. We can write it down, speak our truth to someone who can listen. We can listen to ourselves. We can be compassionate with all of it from numbed inertia to the rawest of sobs. It all has a place - if we let it.

And in between the recognisable emotions, so subtle we don’t even notice it, is melancholy. Melancholia. We are sad. We unsee our sadness. We get anxious and angry, our sadness disguised to get closer to us, demanding attention in uncomfortable ways. What we do with our sadness when we have it firmly in our sights isn’t always very clear

If you’re in the inbetween, the liminal, the threshold or stuck in a chapter you’re tired of reading - I’m thinking of you as I type these words. It will change, of this we can be sure. And we will be OK.