empty crib

Three weeks to memorize her face, her scent, the sound of her breath. Three weeks to live the motherhood I had spent my entire life preparing for. And then it was gone. No one talks about what comes after — how your body aches for something it can never get back, or how your mind becomes a battlefield where hope and reality collide over and over again. I might never become a mother again. And somehow... I'm still standing."

Hope isn't always light and inspiring, sometimes it's just survival. If you're navigating infertility, IVF, or loss, and you're tired of being told to “stay positive,” this is for you. Here’s how to hold on, even when hope feels like too much.

"This isn’t the kind of favour you can casually slip into conversation. There’s no easy way to ask a woman to carry your child for nine months—to share her body, risk her health, and tie her life to yours forever. Two years into our search for a surrogate, we’ve learned how profoundly uncomfortable it is to need something this extraordinary from someone else. We’ve had one ‘almost.’ A friend who said yes, then realized she couldn’t. We didn’t blame her—how could we?