Aven Kane

Your morning at the St. Petersburg Pier Playground would be raw enough without suffering the inquisition that is to come. However, you hardly have time to greet your niece and nephews before your sister’s friend Felicia starts asking about your fertility journey.

Her questions begin innocently enough: “How long have you and James been trying?” Then, she transitions into a more invasive line of queries: “Are you using ovulation sticks? What are the doctors saying?”

Finally, she makes the hallmark mistake of attempting to relate to you by sharing her own ‘struggles’ with fertility. “I know exactly how you feel, girl. It took me, like, six months to get pregnant with Adelaide. I was convinced something was seriously wrong with me.”

To be fair, Felicia probably doesn’t say those precise words to you. It is also possible that your conversation unfolds entirely differently than how you will later remember it. Likely, she uses far more compassion than your future self will give her credit for.

Even still, her well-meaning ‘advice’ lingers in your heart like salt on a wound. When she says, “I believe God has a plan, you know? Everything happens for a reason,” you feel your hands clench into fists.

Why do Felicia’s words strike you with such intensity? She is not the first person to offer you misguided ‘advice.’ In fact, just last week, a woman you work with listened to your infertility fears and then immediately launched into a story about how her daughter-in-law was so fertile that she became pregnant while on birth control pills not once but twice. 

“It sounds like you both just need to relax,” she had said, oblivious to the stress hives that were rising on your neck. “Have you considered taking a vacation?”

Your co-worker’s words were troubling, but Felicia’s ‘advice’ downright enrages you—to the point that you angry-cry in your car for several minutes before you are able to compose yourself enough to drive home that day.

Is it her smugness? Her certainty? Her erroneous belief that she has any idea what you’re going through simply because she and her husband had to ‘try’ for a few months?

If you and James had succeeded in getting pregnant within the first six months, your own baby would likely be older than Adelaide. At the very least, your children would be mirror images of each other, smiling and kicking as you strolled through this park together.

If you and James had followed Felicia’s trajectory, you would be one of the playground mothers by now. They certainly wouldn’t be giving you looks of fear, derision, or whatever other emotion shone in that woman’s eyes when she spotted you earlier.

Objectively speaking, was that mother even judging you? Or is this another instance where your fears have manifested into an echo chamber of conviction? Are you so distraught about being an outsider that you perceive ostracism where maybe there is none?

The distinction doesn’t matter. Not right now, at least.

If your fertility ‘struggles’ mirrored Felicia’s, there would be no need to ask yourself these questions. Nor would you be crying in your car like a sweaty, overdressed middle schooler who just wants to belong somewhere for once.

Wiping the snot from your nose, you reach for your phone, thinking a few minutes of mindless scrolling on social media may calm you down enough to make driving home possible. 

Unfortunately, the first photo that appears on your feed is the radiant image of a pregnant woman you’ve never met. She’s the new wife of one of your acquaintances, and she looks sensational in a flowing goddess gown with her hands cradled over her belly. A tangerine sunset shines in the background as she dips her toes into the Gulf of Mexico.

A few months ago, you would have appreciated this image. Maybe even ‘liked’ the photo or commented with a string of heart-eyed emojis. Today, however, a cancerous thought appears in your mind before you have a chance to screen it: “It’s not fair.”

This declaration is followed by even more poisonous judgments: your acquaintance is a bartender who still drinks to excess almost every single night. You can only imagine his new wife is the same. Why do they get to get pregnant so easily, while you and James have to turn your entire lives upside down to even stand a chance?

Your bitterness surprises you. You have always maintained that you would never become the type of woman who was so swept up in her own grief that she couldn’t be happy for anyone else. However, your cynicism has obviously been festering. Today, it lays raw and putrid before you, an open wound whose edges have gone gangrene and infected your bloodstream.

You recognize that part of you has indeed grown rotten. And that part, unearthed for the very first time, hates your acquaintance and his stupid, pregnant wife. It hates Felicia, her squirrel-cheeked children, and the playground women who very likely weren’t judging you, because they were so busy being incandescent mothers that your existence didn’t even ping their radars as noteworthy.

Most of all, the rottenness at your core hates you. For keeping score with James, for finding comfort in his sadness, for judging other women, and for being so consumed with your own misery that you have already forgotten the founding principles of who you are. 

Making eye contact with yourself in your rearview mirror, you wonder, when did the person staring back at you become a stranger?