I need to cancel the process. This is not the sort of sentence you imagine writing at 38, between meetings, WhatsApp voice notes and the quiet adult choreography of planning dinner.
It was meant to be just another administrative task — ring the clinic, apologise, reschedule, be the kind of woman who has a future neatly pencilled in. Instead, it became the day my body clock slammed its handbrake on because my life had just driven off a cliff.
I found out my partner had cheated. And somewhere between the shock and the nausea, I realised I couldn’t go to the clinic that day to collect my hormone injections. Or any day after that.
Three months earlier, freezing embryos had felt like the most romantic admin imaginable. Not flowers or diamonds — something better. Time. Options. A future-proofed version of us. We’d been inspired, by his sister and partner, who were doing the same thing at the same time. A family affair, but with more needles and less chicken parmigiana.
We joked about it then. About being very modern. About being sensible. About how wildly unsexy fertility clinics are — all grey carpets and motivational posters that feel like they were written by someone who has never met a uterus. We were buying ourselves breathing room. Space. The luxury of not having to rush life just because biology was tapping its watch. We were going through it together. Which mattered. Because fertility treatment is not just medical; it’s emotional CrossFit. You come out bruised, hormonal, and deeply bonded to anyone who saw you cry over a poorly timed blood test.
Fast-forward a year. She’s pregnant. And we’re still processing intimacy and re-reading Esther Perel. The timing was devastatingly exact, the sort that lingers long after, I was quietly altering how I understood my own hope for a future with children.
Let me be clear: I am happy for them. Truly. I am elated. Their baby is wanted, loved, and arriving into a family that will adore it. I don’t want to be the woman who can’t hold two truths at once. I don’t want to be bitter or small. But I am also devastated. And scared. And grieving a version of my life that vanished quietly, without ceremony, when I hung up the phone and said, “Yes, please cancel.”
Photography: Cherish Yourself
We entered fertility treatment together, buoyed by science and shared timing. She emerged pregnant. I emerged changed — and learning how to survive the gap between expectation and reality
What nobody really prepares you for is the administrative heartbreak. The forms. The phone calls. The polite voices at clinics who have no idea they are speaking to you at the exact moment your entire internal scaffolding is collapsing. There is no ritual for this kind of loss. No language for it, really. Just logistics.
Now there are dinners to attend. Smiles to practise in the mirror. A sister-in-law who deserves joy, and a woman inside me who feels like she’s been handed an empty envelope marked Future.
I show up. I ask the right questions. I coo at scan photos and baby socks and nod along to conversations about cravings and names. I do this because I am not a monster, and because love does not evaporate just because grief has moved in as loud houseguests.
But there are moments — small, treacherous ones — where my chest tightens unexpectedly. In the bathroom at family gatherings. On the drive home. At night, when my brain does that charming thing where it replays every decision I ever made and asks, What if? What if I’d just frozen my eggs earlier? What if I’d trusted less? What if my body now can’t make a baby?
There is a particular loneliness in watching someone walk out of a tunnel you entered together. We started this journey side by side, needles and hope and gallows humour. She came out holding a future. I came out holding a receipt. And yet — and this is the bit I am still learning to believe — hope does not only live in freezers.
It lives in bodies that surprise you. In lives that re-route. In the fact that fertility is not a moral reward system, nor a punishment for loving the wrong person. It lives in science that keeps moving forward, and in stories that refuse to end where we thought they would.
I don’t know how my story finishes. That’s the truth. I don’t have eggs or embryos on ice, or guarantees, or the soothing certainty of a plan A neatly labelled and stored.
But I do have myself. Wiser. Clearer. No longer injecting optimism into a relationship that couldn’t hold it. I have space now — not the frozen kind, but the real kind — to build a future that is honest, even if it’s terrifyingly undefined. One day, I might tell this story differently. With a baby on my hip, or a life that makes sense in ways I can’t yet imagine. Or simply with peace. And maybe that’s enough for now.
For today, I will hold joy and grief in the same hand. I smile and I mean it. I also mourn quietly. And I will trust — awkwardly, imperfectly — that my life is not over just because one version of it didn’t make it out of the lab.
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All opinions and observations are written reflections that are personal and subjective, not factual claims or advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, please seek support from a doctor or qualified health professional.
©CherishYourself 2026
