I don’t know how to write anymore. When I was waiting for H to arrive, the pain of being childless was so acute that the words flowed out of me. I couldn’t sleep for the noise inside my heart, and writing became a cathartic release in sharing the collective secret story of so many women I knew.

Now I feel mostly alone and under pressure to be thankful for what I already have. My true feelings are swallowed, zipped up and covered over because who really wants to know anymore? Why would we keep crying out for more? Why would I keep writing when everyone has heard it all before?

I’m caught between making the most of my beautiful child, because if I’m not fully present to the joy of being a mother I’ll waste what I’ve been given, and yet I live with a weighty aching desire for more babies. I grieve the family I longed for, whilst knowing I have been given what some women never get to experience.

It’s a complete head mess.

Everyone else seems to be getting on with life. So many of our peers who easily had kids before us, along with infertility buddies delighting in their unexpected broods, don’t ask about the lack and the longing. I guess it feels too awkward to ask what it’s like to live with it when they don’t have to. Perhaps they think I should just be content – after all, I have a child and I’m only getting older. Or perhaps their lives are so full of family, work and community that they don’t think about how quiet and not-quite-complete our home feels. They don’t ask about the child I’m still waiting for; the one I feel is missing.

But the pain is still so very real and I can’t work out how to show up fully joyful in a life I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. So much of what I have is so good and I am so very, very grateful. But I’m also totally and utterly broken. If this is meant to be the Promised Land, why does it look more like the wilderness?

I don’t know how to position myself in faith – whether to keep hoping or give up. Surrendering to God is based on trust but this journey has unearthed some tangly trust issues with the Almighty. Only the very few and faithful of our friends remain committed to persevering prayers of hope for us. Everyone else must know better…

I still have flashes of bitterness, offence and anger – but prolonged disappointment will do that to a person. The separation from this unborn, unknown child writhes in agony within. I’m left breathless at times by the physical reality of its intensity. How many years of unanswered prayers need to go by before the prayers stop being uttered? I wonder when Abraham and Sarah and Zachariah and Elizabeth gave up on the subject with God. I long to know what it actually looked like for them. I wish the Bible didn’t leave so many gaps, so many words left unsaid. I wish suffering didn’t have to be part of our story.

I wonder whether I stumble to write because in many ways there is little more to say. Secondary infertility is very similar to the first time around, although the me from ten years ago would want to scratch my eyes out for saying that. It’s nothing like the same. And that’s true too. But actually so many of my blog posts from the last decade are as relevant to me now as they were then. It’s just this time I’m not positioned with the same sense of certainty as I was then. This time I know about the catalogue of medical obstacles. This time it feels way more impossible that a miracle will come to pass. And if I’m honest, I feel a bit burnt out now from hoping and waiting.

Secondary infertility looks like inertia; like life moving forward for everyone else but you; like pregnancy announcements still wounding; like every new introduction leaving you wondering whether they think you chose to have just one child. Secondary infertility looks like letting go whilst not quite being ready to sell all the baby gear; like rolling with the steady rhythms of family life whilst hoping for a happy unexpected interruption; like pondering how on earth to fill the next twenty-five years of work whilst grieving that the full-time years of motherhood came to an abrupt end that you couldn’t control.

Secondary infertility looks like being triggered every single day in so many different ways and knowing that being in this heightened state of rawness is just the norm. It’s envying everyone whose struggle to have kids has now been redeemed, healed, restored and wondering why God has decided you’re not worthy of the same treatment.

Secondary infertility comes full of the experienced awe of pregnancy, birth and the baby years and knowing you’re not done with all that yet. Who wouldn’t want to do it again? It’s no surprise God adores creating life when it is so utterly mysterious and majestic. It’s no wonder the Bible calls children a gift and reward.

Secondary infertility comes laced with the additional agony of a hope-filled child who prays with earnest faith for a sibling and regularly asks when those prayers will be answered. God can do anything, she reminds me. She’s not wrong, of course, but I don’t know what to tell her.

Secondary infertility ponders when to give up, knowing that the menopause arriving some day will deliver the final nail in the coffin of this dream anyway. But in the meantime, somewhere deep inside, the heartbeat of rebellious, unreasonable hope still thrums with what could be. And I find myself reflecting often whether this counts as idiocy or faith?