The Month I Stopped Counting

Pearl Jam - Ottawa 2016

Six years.

Not even a false positive.

Every month, the same ritual. The wait. The test. The two minutes that felt like the longest of my life, standing in a bathroom, bargaining with a piece of plastic, already knowing and refusing to accept it.

And then the confirmation. Every single time, a slap in the face. A betrayal from my own body. A door closing quietly, again, while the clock I could hear getting louder just kept ticking.

I was running out of time. I could feel it. And I could not make my body listen.

I have never felt more out of control in my life, and I am a woman who controls everything.

 We got married in 2010.

We took a year to just be married. No rushing. No agenda. Just us figuring out what this life was going to look like.

I remember the night I told Vince I was ready. We were in Quebec, at dinner, on holiday. I said the words out loud and felt something open up, like the next chapter was officially beginning.

I had no idea what was ahead of us.

The first year we were relaxed about it. Not even really trying, just not not trying. We figured it would happen when it happened.

It did not happen.

 By the end of year one I was already researching. Already tracking. Already turning something intimate into a project I could manage, because managing things is what I do when I feel out of control.

Stress. Timing. Him. Me. Diet. Sleep. Every variable under the microscope.

We finally went to a fertility clinic. Ran every test. Waited for an answer that would give me something to fix.

 The answer was: unexplained.

Unexplained?!

What the f*** does that even mean?

I am a woman who needs a reason. I need proof. Something I can point to and solve. And they were telling me there was nothing there. Just, unexplained.

That word broke something in me. Because if there is no reason, there is nothing to fix. And if there is nothing to fix, there is nothing I can do.

That was the most terrifying place I had ever been.

Give me a diagnosis. Give me a protocol. Give me anything except a shrug and a word that means we don't know.

 So I did what I always do when I cannot control the outcome. I controlled everything around it.

I went through our entire house. Every product, every cleaner, everything we put in and on our bodies. I threw out anything toxic. Changed what we ate, how we lived, what touched our skin. I dove deep into natural health the connection between what we consume and how our bodies function. I became someone who read labels, questioned everything, and rebuilt our environment from the ground up.

I started acupuncture. Supplements. Tinctures. Remedies I could barely pronounce but took faithfully every single day.

And none of it worked.

 Meanwhile the world kept moving.

I remember standing at Kindertown, watching a client and friend walk in, a woman I had known for years, glowing, hand on her bump, announcing her third. And I smiled. I said congratulations. I meant it and I didn't mean it at the same time.

I drove home and I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes before I could go inside.

That became a pattern. Group texts I had to respond to with a heart emoji while something inside me went quiet. Gender reveals I showed up to and performed happiness through. Baby shower gifts I bought with a smile and cried over alone later.

I was not a bad person. I was a woman in pain with nowhere to put it.

So I put it inward. Got harder. Built walls I told myself were just strength.

I was not just losing hope month by month. I was losing myself. And the worst part was I could not tell anyone because I did not even have language for what was happening to me.

 Years three, four, five.

Nothing.

Sex became a chore. Scheduled. Purposeful. Every moment of intimacy with an agenda attached to it which is the fastest way to drain a marriage of everything that made it worth having.

I began to resent Vince. Not because of anything he did. Because he was there and I had nowhere else to put what I was carrying. We stopped talking about it not because we agreed to, but because neither of us had anything left to say that we had not already said. We lay in bed at night, side by side, in our own separate grief.

I was showing up everywhere, work, life, relationships, performing fine. Letting no one in. Holding it together on the outside while quietly dying on the inside.

Each month a little more gone.

I had been so focused on getting pregnant that I had completely forgotten how to be his partner. And he had been living with a woman who was slowly disappearing.

 We tried IUI.

Every needle. Every pill. Every clinically timed, monitored, scheduled attempt. I remember lying there feeling like I was playing a role I was never supposed to be in. Like I was forcing my body into something it was not ready for, and the harder I pushed, the more it resisted.

The biological clock was deafening by this point. I was watching the window close. I could feel it.

And then I broke.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would have noticed from the outside.

Just a quiet collapse of everything I had been holding up.

I remember the morning it happened. I had just gotten my period. Another no. And I sat on the bathroom floor and I thought, I cannot do this anymore. Not one more month of this. Not one more needle. Not one more performance of hope I no longer felt.

Vince and I had the most honest conversation we had in years that night. About how far we had drifted. About what this had cost us. About the fact that if we kept going the way we were going, we were not going to make it, not as parents, not as anything.

We needed to stop. And we needed to find each other again.

So we went to Italy. Four weeks. The most alive I had felt in years.

No tracking. No timing. No agenda. Just two people who loved each other, in a country that made it impossible not to feel that.

We came home and made a decision together, out loud, honestly, in a way we had not spoken in a long time. If children were not part of our life, we would build a life we were proud of anyway. We would travel. We would be us.

I said it with my whole head.

My heart was still not convinced.

I was meant to be a mother. I knew it the way you know certain things about yourself, not logically, just true. But I was beaten down to the point where my heart could not take the pain any longer. So I let the decision land. I let myself grieve it. And slowly, something in me went quiet in a different way, not the quiet of suppression. The quiet of acceptance.

You can accept something completely in your mind and still grieve it in your body. That is not weakness. That is just how deep some things go.

2016. Pearl Jam announced a tour.

We followed them. Quebec. Ottawa. Toronto. Three shows, carefree, in love, not thinking about anything except the music and each other.

I came home pregnant.

I remember staring at that test for a long time.

Six years of that same ritual, the wait, the two minutes, the answer that was always no. And this time the line was there. Both of them. I just stood there. Not crying. Not celebrating. Just very, very still.

Like my body was saying: I told you I would when you were ready.

The moment I stopped fighting myself was the moment everything changed. Not as a metaphor. Literally.

I have thought about the timing more times than I can count.

Six years of needles and clinics and supplements and forcing. And then the moment I genuinely let go, not performed letting go, but released it in my body, iit happened.

The stress was gone. The agenda was gone. Vince and I were back, fully, honestly, emotionally back. And something in me that had been braced for years finally exhaled.

I did not have language for it then. I understand it now.

What we carry mentally and emotionally does not stay in our minds. It lives in the body. The tension, the grief, the pressure, the control, all of it has a place it goes. And sometimes the body cannot do what you are asking of it until you put down what you have been carrying.

And then, because life has a way of making sure you really understand something, it happened again.

Years later, after everything, trying for our second. The same pattern emerging. The same quiet grief starting to build.

And then one night, uninhibited, carefree, not thinking about any of it, Mattais was conceived.

The same truth. The same body. The same lesson.

It was not a coincidence the first time. It was definitely not a coincidence the second time.

My body was never broken. It was waiting for me to stop treating it like a problem to solve.

His name is Layo Vedder Valeri.

Named after Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, because without that tour, without Italy, without Vince and I finding our way back to each other, he would not exist.

And his brother is Mattais. Proof that some things are not random. That the body listens when you finally stop fighting it.

I became a mother at 37. And again at 41.

Both times the same way. Not through force. Through release.

If you are in the middle of this right now, the tests, the waiting, the grief you perform around other people's announcements, the relationship quietly fraying at the edges, I want you to know that I see you.

Not the version you are showing everyone else.

The one sitting on the bathroom floor.

She is not broken. She is carrying too much. And there is a difference.

The clarity was always there. The body was always capable. Sometimes the only thing standing in the way is everything we are holding.