This letter was written 18 months after my TTC journey came to an end, when I was overcome by a new wave of grief.

 . . . . .

Dear Sandra

I remember you well. That 32-year-old who feels heartbroken, confused, guilty for being human and fighting to feel good. You are in Florida, the bank you are working at, has sent you on a leadership course, as you said you wanted to leave to travel around South America, and they think you have gone insane and are trying to fix you and convince you to stay. But this is no ordinary leadership course, you are there with 10 other "executives” and you are all going on a journey back in time, via regression therapy, to your childhood looking for the root of negative beliefs which no longer serve you. You feel vulnerable and determined, brave and afraid. You feel like a failure for not having a partner, you felt like it was all your fault, you have this recurring thought that if only you had not looked at his phone, you would not have seen that he was cheating, and not be left with these horrible doubts as to why you were not enough, why he did not love you. However, you discover during this week that you sensation of "not being good enough" comes from your childhood and you pinpoint your parents’ separation when you were 11 years old, when you felt like a fool for not understanding what was happening, and how that taught you to suppress all "negative" emotions, and bend and squeeze to make others’ lives easier.

But during that week, something shifted, the unauthentic mask of trying to please everyone started to fall, and a voice started to raise inside you, a voice telling you to the world needed the real Sandra to stand up, to stand up and be imperfectly her, to look hard in the mirror and see the person who makes mistakes like all of us, but a person who is willing and able to take responsibility and learn from those mistakes, a person who is capable of making the world a brighter place, a person who needs to let her uniqueness shine, and not be a yes girl...

I cannot remember the moment during that week that you decided to voice that you want to be a mum. Did it just come out when you recorded the end of course video or before? What I do remember is in the video you formally conceived an idea that had been with you since you were 3 years old, that you wanted to be a mother, that you would be a good mother, that you wanted to give that baby, child, adolescent, and adult so much love and affection that they would know that they were good enough and never doubt it...

You also had it clear that you wanted to find the right person and share this experience with them. You did not want to do this alone; you wanted your child to be surrounded by unconditional love from a mother and father living in the same home.

You felt empowered from saying out loud "I want to become a mother". "I will be a good mother". "I love my curvy body and childbearing hips". You claimed our dream, you said it out loud and felt liberated. You felt confident that it would happen. You assumed that it would be easy to find Mr Right. You assumed that you would get pregnant easily. You assumed that you would have a happy healthy baby with blue eyes. Although you did not yet have names for Lucia and Leo you assumed that you would have one boy and one girl. You assumed that our fairytale would come true, and we would live happily ever after…

Sandra McNicol