Gloria Labay

For many years, I believed that moving forwards meant becoming a mother.

When I finally understood that this dream would never come true, I thought moving forwards meant leaving it behind.

With time, I discovered that neither was true.

After seven years of infertility, pregnancy losses, fertility treatments and a failed adoption process, I found myself in a place no one had prepared me for. I was not going to become a mother, yet I was no longer the woman who had started that journey.

We live in a society that constantly tells us to "move on," to "close the chapter," to "get over it." As if grief had an expiration date, and moving forwards meant leaving behind what has shaped us.

That has never been my experience.

Moving forwards has not meant forgetting.

It has not meant stopping missing the child who never came.

It has not meant replacing one dream with another.

Instead, it has meant something far more humble—and, at the same time, far more profound.

It has meant learning to live with an absence that will always be part of me, without allowing that absence to define my whole life.

For more than twenty-five years, I have accompanied thousands of women on their journey into motherhood while quietly learning how to live without ever becoming a mother myself.

For a long time, these two realities felt impossible to reconcile.

Today, I understand that they shaped both the professional and the woman I have become.

Out of that pain, a personal project was born.

Then came the support groups, my training as a grief therapist and, eventually, a book.

Looking back, I realise that moving forwards was never one big decision.

It was a succession of small acts.

Accepting that another treatment had come to an end.

Letting go of one more possibility.

Saying goodbye to adoption.

Leaving behind the room I had imagined for a baby who never arrived.

Moving to a new home.

Finding joy in new projects.

Building a community.

Writing.

Allowing myself to imagine a future that looked different from the one I had always hoped for.

People sometimes ask me when the grief ended.

The truth is that it didn't.

It changed.

It became quieter.

Less overwhelming.

It stopped filling every corner of my life.

And alongside it, other things slowly began to grow.

Friendship.

Creativity.

Purpose.

Peace.

The ability to enjoy moments that once felt impossible.

I still wonder who that child might have been.

I believe I always will.

But I no longer need an answer to that question in order to live fully.

Perhaps that is what moving forwards really means.

Not leaving grief behind.

But building a life that becomes bigger than grief.

Because grief does not disappear.

It becomes part of us.

And when it no longer occupies the whole landscape, new paths begin to appear—paths we were simply unable to see before.