Just like a tree is nourished by its many roots and the soil that holds everything in place, every story we tell can begin in many places and is shaped by the words we choose to piece it all together.

The Fertility Abundance Garden is teaching me so much about finding soft, gentle ways into our deepest, most intimate fertility narratives. Opening up and becoming more receptive to the internal dialogues we have with ourselves and each other as creators is one way we transform and reimagine our relationships with fertility and creativity. Being able to access and articulate what we truly feel and how we want to create is vital to sustaining flow and nurturing wellness as a creator. 

Just like the soil has to be soft before we can dig out the weeds without damaging the roots of the plant we want to save, so too do the language and lens with which we talk about our fertility stories determine how much we are able to unearth and lovingly witness about what we have been through and what we hope for our futures. 

There is a way to journey into some of our darkest, most hidden places without causing more harm or trauma to ourselves. Many times a story can be so layered and tangled in knots that just thinking about it from a chronological or “just the facts” perspective triggers waves of anxiety or an instinct to shutdown and retreat for self-preservation. This discomfort and distress is exacerbated when the words we use to tell our story are not even our own, but rather the external imprints of conversations other people are having about our stories. 

One of the most critical first steps in the softening of our soil is to ensure that the language we are using is truly our own. We embody more power, and accelerate the healing process in the wake of grief, loss, and heartbreak, when we decide how our stories are told and define what each moment means for ourselves. The truth is, only we can author what has happened in our bodies, and this authoring is every creator’s sacred responsibility, now and always. 

When the soil around whatever grew from our fertility and creativity practices has not yet been softened enough, it’s very difficult—and sometimes even impossible—for new questions, thoughts, and understandings to be received and absorbed. Nurturing a gentler way into our stories means consciously choosing language that centers our power as creators. It also means slowing down to the pace of possibility when processing and unpacking our stories so that the liberating truth of a matter has a chance to take root, emerge, and be seen and experienced in a healthy, soul-restorative way.

Essential to the labors of cultivating and sharing authentic narratives about our birth stories, pregnancies, mothering journeys, fertility practices, relationships with partners and co-creators, passions, creative projects, girlhood-to-womanhood memories, relationships with our mothers and mother figures, dreams and visions—and whatever else we feel called to speak on—is a radical commitment to the truth of whatever it is our bodies, hearts, and minds have lived through. 

The substance of everything we need to say is already alive and pulsing within. When the softening happens, the words flow fluidly and abundantly.

Soft, moist, vibrant soil yields generous, new freedoms when crafting fertility narratives. Inside the expansive world of our fertile soil, we are able to take up more space within our stories. With more ease, we identify the real words and then take great care to organize and situate our words in ways that amplify our realities as creators. 

With each evolution of the telling and the sharing we discover the vastness of our beings and our creations. We remember with love, celebration and gratitude that when the soil is soft we really can bring the most beautiful parts of ourselves and our stories to life.

process & practice: fertility word sprouts

• Find your journal, open up a fresh page on your laptop, start a new email to yourself. Get ready to journal, however you like to do it.

• Think about a critical turning point in your journey as a creator. When did you realize a new truth about your fertility? How did you know that your creativity needed to be expressed in a certain way? Where were you when a piercing clarity awakened you to the life you are living now?

• When you have a memory that rises to the surface, write down what it is with one or two sentences.

• From the following question seeds, choose one that feels most relevant or most resonates: What happened to me? Why is this moment so significant to my story? How do I feel about this moment now? How did I feel about it when it first happened? How did this make me grow? What did this lead me to create?

• Write your selected question seed on your page. Then somewhere else on your page, or posted up somewhere visible to you in your writing space, write down: My story, my words, my truth.

• Take a moment to reread those words aloud or in your mind, My story, my words, my truth. As you repeat the mantra, become more aware of your breath. Deepening the breath and feeling the expansion within, say the mantra internally as you continue to inhale and exhale.

• Return to the space on your page and begin answering with a stream of conscious, free write. Allow all the words to come as the do. Keep writing for at least 5 continuous minutes. Don’t erase, edit, or censor. Just write.

• When you feel like you have generated an amount of content that feels good to you, set it down. Take a few minutes to rest and step away from your writing.

• When you are ready to come back to the process, revisit the mantra for a moment, My story, my words, my truth.

• Read through what you wrote. Soften the impulse to edit or amend and just read.

• Now read it again with your authentic truth lens. Read one sentence (or one line, or one phrase—whatever makes sense for how you wrote it down) at a time. After ever sentence, ask yourself, Is this true? Underline everything that is true.

• Now read through it once more with your feeling lens. Going sentence by sentence, circle all the words that make you feel an expansion in your body, warmth in your fingertips, or a flutter in your belly.

• On a separate page (or underneath what you have written) make a list of all the words you circled. These are your fertility story word sprouts.

• Over the next few days, weeks, or months, revisit your word sprouts. When you are ready to go deeper into writing about this story, pick one of your sprouts to explore.

• Begin writing about the original memory (or another memory if it’s shifted through your writing) from the context of the word sprout and see where your story grows.

• When you need a change or want to experiment with a different beginning to your story, choose a new word sprout or question seed, and then start the process over again.

• Now read through it once more with your feeling lens. Going sentence by sentence, circle all the words that make you feel an expansion in your body, warmth in your fingertips, or a flutter in your belly.

• On a separate page (or underneath what you have written) make a list of all the words you circled. These are your fertility story word sprouts.

• Over the next few days, weeks, or months, revisit your word sprouts. When you are ready to go deeper into writing about this story, pick one of your sprouts to explore.

• Begin writing about the original memory (or another memory if it’s shifted through your writing) from the context of the word sprout and see where your story grows.

• When you need a change or want to experiment with a different beginning to your story, choose a new word sprout or question seed, and then start the process over again.

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Are you ready to activate your superpowers as a creator in the fertility abundance garden? Learn more.

///Scene: Binah dances through the labors of a miscarriage/// Check out the Fertile Freedoms Listening Party where Binah creates online performance and storytelling events about her fertility journeys.

We are collecting fertility stories as part of the Fertile Freedoms Movement. Increasing awareness around the diversity of our experiences as creators is a central part of the Fertile Freedoms vision. As we explore, cultivate, and sustain more fertile and creative possibilities for ourselves, sharing our stories with each other is one ways we collectively seed more fertility abundance in our world.

Sometimes we start out responding to one idea, but surrendering to the writing takes us some place different, some place else that we really need to go. Discovering that flow of transparency and honesty in our words can be life-changing. Writing, in this way, becomes one of the most courageous and liberating things we can do when committing to nurturing and sustaining fertility wellness.

The following writing prompts are offered as points of entry to support you in getting deeper into your story. They are inspired by a mashup of fertility and creativity stories. Wording is intentionally soft and nonspecific sometimes to encourage you to interpret (or edit) as needed and write from a voice that makes space for your story to exist in a way that is authentic to you.

1. Write the story of your mother giving birth to you.

2. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your mother.

3. Write the story of your grandmother giving birth to your father.

4. Write the story of your great-grandmother giving birth to your grandmother or grandfather.

5. Write about getting your first menses (period).

6. Write the story of your womb. What has she seen? Where has she been? Who/what has she birthed? What has she released?

7. Write about your first sexual experience.

8. Write about a time when you felt so alive, so excited, so passionate about what you were doing or where you were going.

9. Write about your journey to conceive a child.

10. Write about your journey to become a mother.

11. Write a letter to your pre-motherhood self.

12. Write a letter to your little girl self.

13. Write a letter to your mother the night before she gives birth to you.

14. Write a letter to your grandmother the night before she gives birth to you mother.

15. Write about a powerful orgasm.

16. Write about a time you followed your intuition.

17. Write about deciding whether or not to keep your baby.

18. Write about choosing whether or not to be a mother.

19. Write about giving birth to your child/ren. Optional: Write a separate story for each child.

20. Write about deciding whether or not to adopt.

21. Write about your ovulation ritual.

22. Write about how your menstruation cycle has evolved from girlhood, to womanhood, to motherhood.

23. Write about meeting the father/s of your children.

24. Write about the moment of conception.

25. Write about losing a baby.

26. Write about your postpartum journey.

27. What does it mean to be a Creator?

28. What does it mean to be fertile?

29. What does it mean to be a mother?

30. Write about why you want to have a baby.

31. Write about why you want to have more children.

32. When did you first know you were a mother?

33. Write about your relationship with your mother.

34. Write about your relationship with your sister.

35. Write about your relationship with your daughter.

36. Write about your relationship with your grandmother.

37. Write about your relationship/s with your children’s father/s.

38. How does it feel to be pregnant?

39. Write about waiting to see if you are pregnant or not.

40. Write about waiting to go into labor.

41. Write about the eggs in your ovaries. What has their experience been, since they have been with you since your mother was pregnant with you?

42. Write about something you feel very passionate about.

43. Write about someone you love.

44. Write about someone who loves you.

45. Write about your breasts and what they have been through.

46. Write about your vagina and what/who has passed through it.

47. What does it mean to be an artist?

48. What do you create?

49. Write about your postpartum body. 

50. Write about how it feels when you dance naked.

51. Write about who you see when you look in the mirror. 

52. Write about a dance experience that made you feel so alive.

53. Write about something you want to create that is always on your mind.

54. Write about a place you’ve never been to but really want to go.

55. Write about a time you travelled by yourself to a new world.

56. Write about your girlhood.

57. Write about your teenage years.

58. Write a letter to your mother about your fertility.

59. Write a letter to your grandmothers about how it has been being raised by their children, your mother and father.

60. Write a letter to your sister.

61. Write about being everyone’s auntie and having no children of your own.

62. Write about having a hysterectomy.

63. Write about having fibroids.

64. Write about navigating hormonal imbalances.

65. Write about the foods you crave when you’re cycle is on the way.

66. Write about how your children have saved your life.

67. Write about how becoming a mother has changed your life.

ready to share your fertility story?
check out the fertile freedoms storyboard.

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Everything about Mother Nature is abundant, and its infinite variation reminds us that, as a creators, we live inside a majestic and fertile reality of creation in each moment.

Fertility Radiance is the source of our power as creators. Fertility radiance is generated when two essential components of being a creator flow in optimal relation to each other: Fertility Abundance and Liberated Action. 

Just as our breath functions as an eternal call and response, inhale…exhale…inhale…exhale, so too do the primary elements of fertility radiance exist within an interdependent rhythm that evolves over time.  

Fertility abundance is where we all begin. Each one of us is the forward revelation of one of two million possibilities—two million microscopic eggs—forming in our mother’s ovaries while she was becoming fully human in her mother’s, our grandmother’s, womb. As women, we are also born with the same multitude of futures in our wombs like our mothers, and grandmothers, and on and on, and back and back. Our fertility abundance runs deep, and we are keepers and bearers of this holy and wondrous creative power from before we are even born.

Fertility abundance is also a state of profound consciousness, a fully embodied knowing and acceptance of our vast and continuously emerging fertile possibilities. 

Liberated Action is the radically authentic movements, choices, and pathways we live out in the realization of our fertile possibilities. These two elements work together simultaneously and nourish the preservation and expansion of the other. When our fertility abundance is regularly and openly felt, we are more able to take liberated actions that are consistent with our fertility dreamscape. When we act frequently in alignment with our fertility and creativity dreams, we tap into larger and larger reserves of fertility abundance.

When we commit to cultivating fertility radiance in our lives, we choose freedom over fear. We choose honesty over denial. We become more resilient in times of heartbreak, despair and trauma, as we are more adept at taking the liberated actions that most align with our authentic fertility dreamscape. 

Cultivating fertility radiance takes practice and experimentation, as each day we experience perpetual change in our relationships, environments, circumstances, thoughts, and challenges. However every ounce of intentionality that we pour into increasing our fertility radiance is potent and has powerful and immediate effects on our lives. 

Fertility radiance enhances our quality of life and can have many applications in our everyday life. For the novelist who is feeling blocked about where to take her story, enhancing fertility radiance can stimulate exciting new energies in the writing process and bring her novel to life in the way she always imagined it would. 

For the ambitious intern at the firm who feels constantly overlooked and undervalued by the partners, developing a fertility radiance practice can boost her confidence, inspire her to speak more boldly and take up more space at her job. 

For the mother who feels overwhelmed with how to nurture her art while juggling her family’s incessant demands, tuning into her fertility radiance can help her learn to center her creative powers and talents so that she can integrate her mothering labors and artistic dreams with more ease and delight. 

Nature thrives, producing unique and beautiful elements every second of every day with exquisite detail, design, and function, because of the Creator’s supercharged fertility radiance.

For the woman who has already lost a baby but feels deeply in her spirit that her child is waiting to come through her, cultivating fertility radiance can activate the intuition that will guide her through all she needs to do to prepare her body, heart, and mind for conceiving a life again.

However we access and apply our fertility radiance, it illuminates and amplifies the truest desires of our soul. Choosing to nurture our fertility radiance is the first part of realizing sustained fertility wellness. 

No matter all we have been through before this now, as creators we are constantly birthing and creating new possibilities. The love and care with which we grow all these gardens—ourselves, our babies, our dreams—is sourced by fertility radiance. Keeping our source flowing freely and abundantly is the secret to realizing everlasting fertility.

Are you ready to cultivate more fertility radiance?
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The pomegranate is an ancient symbol of fertility, its many seeds a representation of the many eggs in our ovaries, of the many possibilities from which we are all born.

Last week I sent individual letters out to almost 100 women that I personally know, inviting them to host a Fertile Freedoms Listening Party. The listening party is an intimate, online, immersive storytelling and performance event where I share my journey of recovering my fertile radiance after a miscarriage. As I was going through the process of sending out each email one by one, I was asking myself, Why are you spending so much time on this? You could just bcc and be done with it.

But I didn’t want to send my very intimate fertility story out as a single, mass message. I wanted to take care of my story, of my words, in a way that only I can. I wanted to think about each woman and each mother I sent my story to. I wanted to remember all the details about her and her life, the conversations and experiences we’ve shared, the intimacies of her fertility stories, family, and dreams.

Each invitation felt like a little gift box I was leaving on her doorstep. I prayed that as they opened my letter they could feel the love I was pouring into this whole exchange. Our fertility is a holy thing, and when we nurture spaces to share our stories with each other we are practicing an ancient and sacred communion as mothers and women. I wanted the power of this process to reach everyone who read my words.

So in tapping into all of these connections, and preparing for the Fertile Freedoms Listening Parties, I thought it would be appropriate to write more specifically about why it’s so important that we share our stories with each other. Of course, there’s way more than 8 reasons why we need to talk about our fertility. But just to get the conversation going, let’s start with these.

#1 To author our own stories about what has happened in our bodies
The words we use to tell our stories have tremendous power over how we experience our fertility. Every word is itself a story, and the memories, emotions, and meanings behind each word support the perpetuation of that story, whether or not it is true in our hearts. Culturally, historically, and economically, our bodies and their stories have been grossly distorted as a part of a systemic need to control what we do with our fertility. Authoring our own narratives gives us control in a way that is not possible when someone else is dictating what is allowed to be said. 

Ultimately, the language we use when unraveling our stories’ layers impacts how we are able to process, heal, and transform the narratives. It is essential that we have autonomy over the words and the ways in which they come together to compose the stories about our fertility. This critical practice of finding and articulating our own words keeps us ever-present with our power, and sustains our courage to make the choices that are most authentic to our fertility dreams. 

#2 To imagine new futures for our fertility dreamscape
Just like our muscles and limbs need room to stretch, our thoughts need space to exist, shift, and evolve. Talking about our fertility gives us the ability to honor what has happened and imagine what else is possible. When speaking openly about our stories, we have a greater capacity to expand on ideas, consider alternatives, and identify the truth of our feelings. Especially for those of us who have ever felt shamed or silenced because of our story, being able to talk freely and transparently about our fertility dreams is one way we reclaim our power and our right to shape the priorities of our fertility dreamscape. 

Everything we are birthing, whether it’s a baby or a creative vision, first needs our permission to be possible. Regular, honest dialogues with ourselves and those who love us give us the necessary time to gain clarity about what we want. These rituals of communication also help us practice trusting ourselves and lead us to feel more confident about the steps we will take to realize our fertility dreams. 

#3 To increase our collective knowledge about fertile possibilities
The more we talk with each other about what’s really going on in our fertility stories, the more knowledge we can collectively access when exploring our individual possibilities. We are all experts about our lives, our bodies, our personal experiences with navigating our fertility. This expertise is sacred and when we practice sharing our stories with other women, we illuminate this deep well of our own knowing that everyone has the ability to cultivate for themselves.

There are so many ways to exchange stories and connect with others who need to hear our stories. As the author of your fertility journey, you get to decide how and when and who you talk to. Every time you open up to share from your truth, you are enriching the soil of our meta-fertility dreamscape. The more possibilities we acknowledge together, the more realities we can all consider when choosing how we want to move forward with our fertility dreams.

#4 To process traumatic moments in our fertility journeys
We need to talk about what has happened to our bodies in the pursuit of our fertility dreams. The practice of putting sound to our feelings, of selecting words for the images playing over and over again in our mind, of organizing the way facts are remembered—all of this is a part of the healing process. We can only begin to imagine those new futures when we have fully acknowledged our past labors. 

Women need to feel safe to revisit the traumatic parts of our fertility stories. We need gentle ears to listen to us and soft places to rest our hearts when we finally get the courage to voice the horrors we have endured and survived. The future of our fertility lives on the other side of what it is we are too afraid to say. Learning how to find our own way into the hardest parts of our stories is another way we access power in bodies and our fertility narratives.  

#5 To stimulate our creativity
Our fertility and our creativity are inextricably linked. Just as suppressing one inhibits the other, amplifying one empowers and expands the other. Talking about our fertility stimulates new thought patterns and reinvigorates energy where there was possibly stagnation or boredom. Discovering a new idea is another way to give birth, and being hyper-present with the many ways we engage our creativity strengthens our receptivity to the possibilities of our fertility. 

Our bodies, our minds, our wombs, our reproductive matter are all the site of constant creation. We are walking, talking creators, at every point of every day. It is a majestic thing to be deeply aware of our magic at all times. Holding onto the possibility of our creative powers enriches and enlivens our fertility dreamscape. We enter every moment more possible than one before it. We greet each opportunity with more passion, curiosity, and optimism, and all this positive energy leads to happier, more fulfilling experiences with our fertility and creativity.

#6 To explore multiple ways to realize our fertility dreams
Fertility and creativity teach us to love multiplicity. Whenever we seek to grow deeper in our creative practice, or get more in tune with our fertility dreams we are presented with an opportunity to look at something from many different perspectives. These labors of bending, twisting, sifting through possibilities strengthen us in a ways that are extremely beneficial when navigating the inevitable unknowns of our fertility dreamscape. 

As we learn to trust ourselves, our dreams, and our intuitive guides, we grow more adept, more flexible, and more receptive to making the most of unexpected openings when they appear. We begin to see and experience our fertile futures more tangibly and less abstractly. More accepting of the infinite variation of how our futures may unfold, we more freely bring our dreams to life. 

#7 To make safe spaces for those who need to talk about their fertility stories
Everyone of us has the power to make a safe space for someone else to tell their story. But first, we have to make our hearts, our minds, our bodies safe places to tell our own stories to ourselves. It takes however long it is going to take, but by practicing loving, gentle kindness towards ourselves throughout the labors of unraveling and untangling our stories, we grow our capacity to be active listeners who can provide safe spaces for others to open up their stories.

When we take radical steps toward vulnerability and transparency, we illuminate the pathways for more mothers and women to shed their own masks and armor. Many of us have learned from girlhood how to close ourselves off for survival, how to protect the sweetest, most delicate parts of our dreams from harsh judgements and violations. Now though, we have to find our way back to the softness where possibility begins. Our fertility dreams are waiting for us there. Creating safe spaces where everyone can share their fertility stories is one way we accelerate our own return to that sweet, loving space of surrender within ourselves.

#8 To seed and nurture a more loving fertility reality for our daughters and granddaughters
Our fertility, our creativity, our lives flourish in a window of opportunity. We know that these moments are for the now, and that we are doing our best to make the most of this now. We also know that the next generations are making their way into their fertile futures too. They are watching us and developing a sense of what will be possible for them by observing what we decide is possible for ourselves. 

The more we experiment with and expand the narratives that shape our fertility dreamscapes, the more seeds we are planting, the more opportunities we are preserving, the more power we are gathering, for those who are responsible for birthing the future of humanity. As it is now, and as it will be then, our labors are sourcing everything and everyone we are birthing. Speaking intentionally, honestly, and lovingly about our fertility has lasting implications for our quality of life, and everything we will create with these lives, for years and years to come.

ARE YOU READY TO CULTIVATE MORE FERTILITY RADIANCE?
JOIN THE FERTILE FREEDOMS MOVEMENT

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The invisible mother dancing through the storm, about 6 weeks postpartum from a miscarriage. Photo by Colin A. Danville

This was my life in my 20s. I came into the revelation of my motherself when I was 24 years old. I was living at the time in a shared house with too many roommates. I was deeply in love, or so I thought, with a man who I believed was my ideal partner, my soulmate—except for the frequent interludes he spent with the other women he also loved. Still, barely making the rent each month to cover the two rooms we had in the back of the house, I held onto the fact that I was the one he lived with. I told myself that made me special.

Early one Saturday morning in spring, gathered around the large island in our sunlit kitchen, a few of us sat together over bowls of steaming oatmeal or granola and nut milk. One of our roommates announced she was pregnant. I was so happy for her, and also instantly aware of my own desire to give birth to a child. This had not been something that my boyfriend and I had talked about in recent times, mostly because he was so closed to the idea. It was a constant source of disconnect for me in our relationship, but one that I would ignore—like all the other women—for too long a time to come.

In the beginning years of awakening to my motherself, I didn’t know how to place my desires for motherhood inside the very chaotic realities of my love life. There were a string of ill-suited situations before I partnered with the father of my children. What I often felt made my experiences of recurring miscarriage so unique was that I was involved with men who didn’t want to have children (some specifically not with me, some not at all). So the tragedy of the loss was complicated each time by their obvious relief in the premature shedding of my womb.

Once an obstetrician at my follow-up appointment after being in the emergency room said very casually, “This happens. Everything will be okay. You all can just try again.” I remember having no words for her, just more tears. She meant well, I knew, but how could she know that the guy sitting across from us in her examination room had spent everyday of my short pregnancy begging me to get an abortion. Many times my postpartum season after a miscarriage was bizarre and disorienting like this. It was like grieving alongside someone else who is rejoicing that you are dying, as a miscarriage is an actual death taking place inside of your own body. They are joyful because they didn’t want to live with you as you are, they didn’t want to experience you as a mother.

I would struggle to reconcile these emotions. Why am I still here? Even now, all these lifetimes later, all these children later, I revisit the woman I was back then and ask her questions, as gently as I can, to uncover more parts of my process. It has taken me a long time to embrace that stage of my development into motherhood and not cringe at all the memories. Sometimes we don’t like the girl/woman/mother we were in our past, but the real healing comes when we can love and celebrate her anyway, and see her as a vital player in our becoming.

I have taken to identifying myself during the shadowy years of fertility trauma, consecutive losses, troubled relationships, and suppressed longings for motherhood as an Invisible Mother. As a writer, language is so critical to me, and has the power to really create space for our experiences when we don’t see our story reflecting back to us from the world as it is. Just finding or creating a phrase, a word, that can encompass the fullness, or at least some partial reality of our fullness, can go a long way towards feeling whole and sane when unraveling the many layers of heartache and despair. For me, not being seen as a mother by my community, not being able to call myself a mother, despite all the many initiations I’d had in the journey toward motherhood was a whole other form of pain. The invisibility of my losses—they were all in the first trimester and I wasn’t showing—added a further layer of erasure to the whole experience. Not only was there no baby, but there weren’t even any witnesses to my grief. Always, I had to mourn alone.

Sometimes I even wondered if my torment was all in my head. If no one else could see me bleeding, maybe I wasn’t bleeding. But over time, I learned how to make space for my grief, lonely as it was. I realized that the only way for me to come out of my despair was to lift myself up one breath at a time, however long it took. I devised strategies for making it through the raw horrors of the moment: declining invitations to friends’ baby showers, throwing away all loss-stained underwear, zoning out on Netflix until at least the physical labors of losing a baby had subsided. 

Once the contractions were over, another part of the healing would have to commence. I always give my children a name, or rather, I hear a name upon conception or soon thereafter. And so even in times of loss, I have this person, this spirit being, this idea, to communicate with. I learned how an essential part of my healing and recovery was in continuing to dialogue with my baby, even though they had transitioned from their path toward being wholly human. Writing letters to them or about them, speaking to them, drawing or painting pictures for them, dancing with the energies I still felt coursing through my body in the wake of their existence—all of this was a way to honor the realness of my motherhood. I needed to anchor my experience in something that came from me, in something no one could ever erase or deny, even when there’d be no baby coming forth this time, no proof that there had indeed been someone there growing inside of me. 

Our fertility dreams, when we are listening, will continuously lead us to leap into unknowns. Photo by Colin A. Danville

I also developed these ways of coping through recurring losses because in my circle of girlfriends, many of them were having babies for the first time. Try as I might, I could not avoid all their baby showers. I could not suspend our friendships indefinitely while I grieved in silent, hidden spaces. For some of my closest friends I became even more deeply involved in their mother journeys, taking on the labors of being a doula, babysitter, postpartum support person for the family. I thought if I can’t have my own baby right now, at least I can be of service to a mother. At least I can be next to the sacredness of motherhood, even if no one else can see that I too am a mother. 

It’s important that no matter how our families, or partners, or friends, or doctors, or community see us, that we see ourselves. Having lived almost a decade of my life as an invisible mother, I often recognize the tell-tale traits in other closeted invisible mothers. It’s sometimes a matter of survival, of self-preservation. If you’re not surrounded by loving, empathetic people, it can be dangerous to reveal your motherself or your mothering dreams. Sometimes people, even the ones who imagine themselves to be in our corner, can say the meanest, most insensitive things. For many invisible mothers, we are treading thin ice as it is to just function as peacefully and positively as we can. And all the while we’re trying to thread our way back to full faith in our fertility space and our womb space so that we can do the inevitable work of trying again. Any negativity, harsh words, or indifference during this extremely vulnerable time can be devastating, debilitating. 

I say all this to say to any of my Beautiful Invisible Mothers out there reading this post, I SEE YOU! Your fertility is real. Your babies are real. Your mothering dreams are real and deserve to be cherished by those worthy of your love, your fertility magic, your energy. Your story matters. You do not have to gather false strengths. It’s okay if you need to sit your homegirl’s baby shower out this time. Send money, send a card, do something nice for her in your own time after the baby comes. A new mommy will always need a helping hand. You are never obligated to explain your absence to people who don’t have the capacity, or the compassion, to hold your story with care. 

I wish someone had told me they could see me when I was going through my invisible mothering years. I wish someone had simply said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” At the bottom of my grief there was this perpetual ache from being so unnoticed, so unacknowledged, and then also feeling like it wasn’t safe to even ask for support because I couldn’t risk not receiving kindness or empathy. In my mothering practice I have come to understand that the hard parts of our fertility journeys are not just passages of time to get over or brush away or ignore. How we experience them, how we grieve them, how we recover, how we restore our fertile radiance in the eternal postpartum of those faded possibilities impacts the opportunities and realities we are able to access in our forward fertility and future mothering journeys. 

Many times instances of fibroids, irregular cycles, difficulty conceiving, hormonal imbalances can be traced to unresolved traumas that altered the natural flow of our fertility processes. We live in a world that will stress external remedies, countless pills, and costly treatments over the extended time, effort, courage, and emotional stamina it might take to uncover the secrets to healing our hurts from the inside out. In addition to, and possibly even instead of, whatever medical advice we receive, we might need to dance through the totality of our experience. We might need to sit with the pain or confusion for a while and just allow it to be named in our hearts and minds. We might need to write or talk through our story. We might need to uproot our lives from one particular geographical location and open our fertile selves up to discovering what might be born from us in a new place. We might need to end the awful relationship once and for all. We might need to walk away from a relentlessly demanding career or a soul-shattering circumstance that leaves us in constant entanglement with factors, environments, or people that do not serve our fertility dreams. We might need to finally, and confidently, center our fertility, being vigilantly intentional that everything and everyone else we’re pouring our precious labors into is aligned with our deepest, wildest fertility dreams. 

Now I look back at the me of my 20s and I love her, I praise her, I cheer her on through the marathon of loss and heartbreaks. She is the reason I am here today, with my bustling band of munchkins that keep my busy and on the move all day long. Her perseverance, her determination, her faith in her fertility even when no one else could see it or cherish it—all of that is why I get to know myself as a mother in my current reality. Her labors, so many of them unsupported, unseen, and unloved at the time, are the reason I get to be Mommy today.

No matter where we are in the process of our fertility, everything is always connected. Be kind to yourself, Dear Mother of Your Own Making, whoever you are, wherever you are. Your fertility is a continuous practice of possibility. Every moment, every thought, every action, every ovulation, every pregnancy, every missed cycle, every loss, every birth, every labor, every dream, matters. 

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