Loss is such a peculiar feeling.

My mother always tells me that you can’t miss what you’ve never had. You know those generic idioms that people impart upon you as a way of encouraging or chastising you into being grateful for what you have, into being content?

Even as child I questioned the legitimacy of this claim but I never really had the emotional maturity or intellect to dissect it fully.

Some days I lack this now so… perhaps little hope remains for me on my journey to adulthood… we’ll see.

Grief

Living with a long term gynaecological health problem creates an experience of grief that I can’t fully explain. Like any grief it is individual and it is intimate.

It’s so different to the feeling of when someone close to you dies. The stages of grieving you pass through help you to heal and in some cases over time this dulls a little except for the occasional wave of emotion which sweeps you off your feet momentarily.

Sub fertility is constant. Well for me it is, I can’t act as a spokesperson for every woman in the world nor would I wish to. There is great  power found in narrating you own story. For me it feels constant. It’s silently spreading throughout the far reaches of my very existence. Some days it feels like a poison. It burns through the most delicate parts of me slowly, some days it’s a wild fire raging across the deserted plains of my uterus.

Small Steps

Each small step I take towards healing, everyday, every post, every story I hear, each empowering piece of work with women I deliver acts as my own little gaviscon fireman soothing the pain. But this is always short lived as everywhere I turn there’s a constant reminder of the ways in which the body in which I live. The body that society tells me should be reproductive, should be fertile, should be feminine, is seemingly failing on all accounts.

I continue to take small steps each day, like each of you who are travelling along your own reproductive journey. We manage our feelings of loss, of disappointment with each new period that arrives when we are trying to conceive. With each hot sweat, each sleepless night. The journey will be long and some days difficult but we’ll make it through.

What small steps do you take? Help encourage other women by Sharing yours below.