(Sometimes I forget).

I have a body. I remind myself stretching, the pops releasing my back before climbing into bed. I roll my wrists, tiny muscles spent from crocheting. We’re working on our relationship, my body and me. I’m working to listen better; my body, in turn, agrees to shout less. I’m trying to forgive the things it will not do, the question mark of grief that whispers, “I can’t.”

I have a body, and my body has me, caught in a lifetime of growth and reproduction—of cells, solely my own—and sometimes pain. It’s easy to forget in the hours of living in a square on a screen, tightly bound and body fighting the fidget.

I turn the light off and tuck the covers under my chin in comfort. I exhale, sending the wave of air from my lungs back to the world.

I have a body.

*

There’s moaning; someone is in pain. Help that poor person, my brain muddles, but the mud catches the words before they reach my vocal cords.

I feel a warmth spread through my body, and there’s an ease and a joy to it. The moaning stops. My brain connects these two things; the moaning was mine.

As was the surgery, and the endometriosis lesions, and I’m left feeling like a lemon has been plucked from my lower back. Months of gripping, clenching, bracing pain erased; my muscles can stretch again. I can exhale, and my belly whimpers at the movement.

The nurse calls me by my middle name, and when my soul friend visits me, I tell her the mishap. Loudly.

“She called me by my middle name,” I say, blunt and disgusted by this atrocity. The drugs have stripped away my kindness, my empathy, focusing everything inward.

Months later, my doctor tells me that if I want to have biological children, I should try sooner rather than later. Endometriosis isn’t known for being timid, or hesitating to return after being cut out.

*

I have a body, and I decide this body can handle the pain of fertility treatment: the pinpricks of needles, blood draws; the shocking gasp of a hysterosalpingogram; and as the tally of failures progresses, the tender and daring pain of hope.

I tell myself as my feet pound uphill on the summer pavement of my run: I am strong, I am love, I am grounded in faith. My burning muscles accept the uphill challenge. I want a baby.

I dare to walk through the infant section of Target.

*

My body has other ideas.

*

After an early miscarriage I buy yarn; my hands need something to do while my eyes are crying. It is the softest yarn I’ve ever bought. Periwinkle.

I crochet a scarf, I call it my Sad Scarf.

There’s comfort in the rhythm, working this yarn that is softer than any baby blanket I’ve made for a niece or a nephew. Short row, turnaround; the knots double back on themselves like a swimmer flipping back into the lane. There are no lanes for this grief, no schedule for the piercing grab of a plus sign on a pee stick gone faded. But there is order to the rows. I don’t count them, I just rock my hands in a rhythm that produces something.

I don’t do patterns, because I don’t want to have to count. Crocheting is rhythmic, relaxing. Counting, for me, is not.

I tuck it in the back of the closet soon after it’s complete. I don’t remember which fertility round it was. The second? The fifth? I forget I made it and move on.

*

Grief is self-centered, and (in)fertility is intimate. Megan Markle publicizes the need for women to talk about miscarriage, to normalize it, to reduce the shame. No, thank you.

I pull my car over to the side of the road. I need a minute to be selfish, so that I can later spend minutes in joy. I’m on my way to shop for decorations for my sister’s baby shower.

It’s possible to hold so many things; auntie joy, intimate questions of grief and body, will you let me. I circle my hands around the outside of the steering wheel, drop them in my lap. It’s possible to hold so much, but I question: body can you hold an embryo, keep a fetus, grow a baby, a life other than my own? My body is so selfish. My grief is selfish.

I feel no shame, but this grief is mine and I will keep it.

*

I can’t hear the stories of others, told in search of empathy or compassion. My infertility fills me up completely, eclipsing ability for empathy. And yet, as a therapist, empathy is my job.

My therapy chair gives me the strength to listen, to make exceptions to my rule, for the clients who sit and tell me the story that is also mine. The space is sacred, deep, and taxing, and healing. I’m not ready for it. Beyond the office, I do not seek out stories or connection. I shut off the unhelpful comments of friends, the promises of someone else’s miracle and the reassurance of God’s plans. I decline all baby shower invitations, and there are dozens. I tell friends who experience miscarriage that we cannot share this, I cannot listen.

Betrayal resides deep within me and my body; someone else’s story cannot touch what is entombed inside me and I have no room for anything else.

*

I have a body, and I pause to listen. I hear the hormones ebbing, the tide going out before the tsunami, pulling the landscape as I’d known it and the air that fills me and the word: enough.

*

“I can’t say I’m done,” I tell my therapist as I look away. She’s heard me talk of visceral nausea when I think of entering the fertility clinic building, she knows my grief without needing me to perform it. My eyes meander over the grass beyond her porch, the trees and the flowers and her sweet dog. My eyes dare to fill with tears, in the presence of another. My eyes meet hers.

“But I think I’m done.”

*

I tell my soul friend that I don’t know how to talk about it, as we walk our dogs along the great lake. It’s hot again, how many cycles of summer has it taken to get here?

She holds space for my grief between each step. It emanates from my pores, whisked away by the lakefront wind. She is a ready listener, but I don’t have words. We talk about other things, vacations with our families coming up; we squint our eyes against the sun, glance wary toward the late-summer wasps. The wasps are comfortable with anger, far more than I am, broadcasting it with their hovering threat.

Her dogs pull toward the water; mine thrashes away from it. All three canines look at us like we have answers to their requests, like we have utter control, like we are as full and capable of love as they are. (And maybe we are). We scratch behind their ears, pick up their shit, kiss their heads, ask them not to pull when they strain against their leashes.

She agrees to come with me when I’m ready to return the last unused dose of fertility medication in my fridge, and the sharps container, to the pharmacy. She and her husband had cheered me on, encouraging me as I plunged the first fertility shot into my belly.

The last dose is still in my fridge, hidden behind the tall container of yogurt and blueberries. Even when the yogurt goes forgotten for a time in the fridge, and it’s time to toss it to the curb, I let it mold and stay there so I don’t have to look. The small teal rectangle containing one dose of fertility medication hides behind. Which expired first, I wonder, the yogurt or the medication? It’s been months.

*

I let my body rest. No more hormones, no more pricks. Walks with the dog. Enough time for the drama to settle, lake water at early morning.

I consider my options. I ask myself and God, what is the best thing I could do with this life of mine? I’m holding grief and something else, an empty space. I marvel at the fact that I can ask this question at all. I marvel at the uncertainty I’ve learned to tolerate.

I remember the crib, a beautiful mahogany crib. A neighbor gave it to me years ago, its edges carefully wrapped in pieces of cut felt. It was presumptive of me to take it. It’s dusty now, in the back of a closet. It’s in pieces.

Listening, I notice the sureness in my arms when I consider holding the weight of a child. The openness in my chest where my heart pumps. The fullness of my house when a niece or nephew inhabits it. The ability to accept what is in front of me.

What kind of epiphany is this, with no exclamation but a settling, feet twisting in the sand as the grains replace what used to be above ground. They disappear by sight but connect deeper to the earth.

It’s not even a question, really. I ask it over and over to be sure, but the answer is always the same, because the answer precedes the question.

I will become a mother.

I will foster babies, holding them as long as they need and then sending them back to biological family, trauma interrupted. Or maybe I will adopt them. It’s unclear, uncertain, full of love.

I have a body and it can be full of love, anyway. Any way.

*

When my brain holds my nervous system and its question in its clutches, away from the lapping edges of sleep, I roll out of bed. Feet to the floor, eyes open to the darkness. I can hear the steadiness of my breath better this way. Inhale, stretch out; exhale, reach down. I follow no regime or flow, only breathing and my body.

“Work with the body that came to practice today.” The words of my yoga teacher bloom in the dark. There’s something there, in the breath of the body. I answer the request to stretch, to breathe, to rest.

*

To forgive, we must first acknowledge the extent of hurt. It’s impossible to let go without knowing what we are releasing. Have I acknowledged my uterine betrayal, or have I just set it to the back of the closet with the Sad Scarf?

I see you, anger. And body, I know, you tried.

*

I clean out the freezer. Why did I stockpile so many frozen Tupperware meals? My counter is a sea of red plastic tops dewing with sweat of meals ignored, thawing enough for me to dump, thwap against the garbage. So much wasted food, Johanna. Not cool.

Soap lathers on the sponge, enough for a sink full of past preparation unused and burned by ice. I batch-cooked before each fertility attempt, I remember as I wiggle my backside to the music. (Dishes are washed best to a beat, even in the midst of self-criticism, perhaps with a dose of denial).

I never needed to eat the meals; I just kept cooking more.

I’ll cook again tomorrow. The heaviness works its way through me and out my limbs.

*

And on my foster shower day, the hallways of doubt (theirs and mine) fill with joy, love expressed through bud vases of daffodils, puff pastries filled with Dubliner cheese and mimosa jam, spaces of art and cheer opened for me; an offering to be the village. Sisters and friends like sisters and mentors and brothers and the parents who rise to love me on this path they did not choose. They tell me it takes a village. I open my arms to let them in.

Delicate teacups are unpacked despite the risk of breaking, cocktail glasses filled because at this baby shower the mom-to-be can drink. I smooth my shirt over my flat stomach and raise my glass in cheer.

*

I go to the craft store. To make scarves for friends, the best gifts crocheted with love. That’s what I tell myself entering the florescent lighting. I finger the yarns I’ve used on past baby blankets for nieces, nephews.

My heart skips a beat as I realize; I’m also buying yarn today for a little one who I will mother.

I allow myself this. I feel for the softest yarn, in a neutral and calm color. Periwinkle.

Any baby of mine is going to need a mama-made blanket.

*

(Sometimes I forget):

That I have a body, that I can use my body to paint a nursery and cook a big batch for the freezer, unencumbered by pregnancy. That there can be joy. That there is a village.

That I have a body, and it is imperfect. And there is grief.

That forgiveness lightens. That forgiveness, like love, is a process.

That I have bought this same yarn before. I made a Sad Scarf with it. It’s in the back of my closet, and it’s soft. And now it has a companion, in progress. I work the yarn, overwhelmed by impending motherhood. A scarf for me, a blanket for baby.

-Johanna Bond

Johanna Bond is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and a writer. She runs a private practice and has written for New York Times Well, HuffPost, Psychology Today, Counseling Today, and the Lindenwood Review. Her words are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and the Kind Writers Literary Magazine (as the 2022 contest winner). She currently reads for the Harvard Review and is a student in the Harvard Extension master’s program in Creative Writing and Literature.