He was right. I had no reason to worry. It wasn’t because my mom had any trouble getting pregnant. She was eighteen when I was born. Maybe it’s because every woman has that fear. I’ve talked to other girlfriends who have thought the same thing. As a woman you feel like you were born to have babies. And if you can’t, you wonder if you can call yourself a true woman, no matter how confident, no matter how strong you are.

It seemed easy at first. I got pregnant the first time we tried. An ectopic pregnancy can happen to anyone at any age. By the time it was discovered, my entire fallopian tube had ruptured. I was bleeding internally. I needed emergency surgery in the middle of the night. They had to remove the entire tube. I knew then my chances of getting pregnant again were cut in half. But my doctor told me I could still get pregnant, that it might just take longer.

We tried for more than three years. The first year, we tried using Clomid, a fertility drug, and once tried artificial insemination. In the second year we discovered I had elevated levels of a hormone that affected my ability to get pregnant. It was as if I had the body of someone who was forty-one, not thirty-one.

That’s when we tried in-vitro fertilization. We spent about $20,000 on two rounds of in-vitro, six months apart. We were reassured we had a good chance of getting pregnant but both times it failed. And my doctor, to this day, can’t explain it. I learned one factor that can’t be measured is how stress can impact a pregnancy.

A few months after the two rounds of in-vitro failed, I unexpectedly got pregnant on my own in the fall of 2005. I had been going through something of a professional crisis and doing a lot of soul-searching. I was completely focused on my career and completely miserable at the same time. So I decided to quit my job at the end of November. Three days before I was going to give notice, I found out I was pregnant. Now I had even more reason to quit. But our happiness ended quickly. When I was seven weeks pregnant, I miscarried.

This was the darkest part of our entire journey. I felt like I might not be able to bounce back to normal. And, honestly, I never really did go back to the way I was. I became a much more skeptical, serious person who was really struggling with “why me?” each and every day. I really felt like a failure.