When I first stopped my birth control pills, I was some combination of nervous and excited. I joked with Sam that I hoped it took more than a month or two to conceive. Still, I was surprised when my first pregnancy test was negative. As a healthy twenty-nine-year-old woman, I had always assumed that the second I missed even a single pill, I’d be instantly knocked up. It was a reprieve though—one extra month without worrying about the responsibility of impending motherhood. Sam and I laughed it off, saying this way we got to have more fun trying.

After six months, we weren’t laughing anymore.

Sam went to get his sperm checked. His boys were perfectly fine, and due to our relatively young age, my OB/GYN encouraged us to keep trying for another six months before we got too worried. Those six months went by, Shelley gave birth to her first child, and I still didn’t have a positive pregnancy test. It was time to investigate further.

And that’s when it all went downhill.

My doctor told me I probably had suffered some sort of infection that left deep scarring in my uterus and especially my fallopian tubes. Natural conception, she told me, would be impossible. We went straight for IVF, even though I was warned even that had a low chance of success given my “inhospitable uterus.” Sam gave me hormone injections at home to stimulate egg production, but when they retrieved my eggs, those too were deemed to be “poor quality.”

I felt like an absolute failure as a woman. My uterus was damaged, my eggs were poor quality, and all our attempts at IVF were expensive disasters. I was wracked with guilt that my “normal” husband couldn’t have the child he wanted all thanks to me, even though he swore again and again that he didn’t blame me. Meanwhile, my boss Denise was utterly unsympathetic about my need to rush out to appointments with the fertility specialist, or about the meeting I had to reschedule when my single successful pregnancy aborted itself after three short weeks.

For a time, I was obsessed with trying to conceive. I dove into it with the same intensity that had made me so successful at my job. I went vegan for a while. I drank something called “fertility tea” that tasted like the dust from our coffee table. I visited every infertility forum in the country and became well-versed in the lingo: TTC meant “trying to conceive” as in “I’ve been TTC for three years with no luck.” AF meant “Aunt Flo”—the dreaded monthly blood that meant another failure. DPT meant “days past transfer” after an embryo was transferred into my uterus—a countdown until the next time I could POAS (“pee on a stick”).