You know that phrase, “when life throws you lemons?” I’m sure you’ve heard it before and I’m sure you’ve heard the overly positive, obnoxious end to it… “make lemonade.” Well sometimes, it’s really hard to add water and sugar and make your shitty situation sweet. Sometimes, you just need to suck on those sour lemons with puckered cheeks, cry a little (or a lot) and take on each day one moment at a time.

Well my friends, puckered cheeks from sour lemons seems to be my life lately.

It’s funny, when you’re young, you spend all your time trying to avoid getting pregnant. You take a pill religiously every day (even though it makes you bloated and sometimes a little crazy). You go through painful procedures to have devices implanted into the tiniest hole of your cervix (who the f*ck came up with this idea?!) You make your partner wrap themselves in a piece of plastic (and pretend you don’t notice a difference). And every month you sigh with relief when you start bleeding because you know with certainty you made it another 30 days without producing a mini version of yourself that you just aren’t quite ready for. The measures we go through to not have a baby are unreal.

Then one day, you get married and, BOOM, all of a sudden you’re ready for a tiny human. Like one day you’re not (because your parents would be disappointed if you got pregnant before marriage and obviously you want to drink at your own damn wedding) and the next day you are.

So you change everything you’ve ever done and go about your business with your new spouse. And you wait. And you wait. And you pee on more sticks than you could imagine because they keep reading “negative.” And you deflect the unbelievable number of insensitive questions and comments that ignorant people throw at you. “When are you going to have a baby?” “You know, your mom really wants to be a grandmother.” “Jess, get a move on!” “Are you pregnant yet?” “You’re already 30, what are you waiting for?”

And it all makes you want to scream.. and sometimes strangle people, which turns out is socially frowned upon, even if they deserve it.

Maybe we don’t want kids. Maybe we still have things we want to do before we think about kids. And maybe, just maybe we’ve been F*CKING TRYING you DUMB ASS and the last thing we need is your two sense and pestering.

Welcome to my life for the past year and a half.

So here I am.. 30 years old, healthy, married to the love of my life, fortunate enough to have a great job and a beautiful home and the means to support a baby. And here I remain, desperately wanting said baby but my damn body won’t cooperate. Thank God for modern medicine and I have faith that, in time, we will be able to have a baby but it doesn’t make the doctors appointments or medicines or mood swings easy. Actually, quite frankly, they SUCK.

But the most important thing I’ve learned during this journey (that I wish I didn’t have to be on) is that I’m not alone. I have the most supportive husband and there are so many other women going through the same thing as me. It’s absurd how common infertility is and how little it is talked about. Why? Why? Why? It’s such a difficult thing to go through and it seems crazy to me to keep everything hush, hush.

So, if you’re reading this and life gave you lemons to work with, remember you’re not alone in this sour journey. Talk to people.. chances are they may have been in your shoes at one time.. and I bet they’ll be able to offer you some hope.