Are We Done… or Just Tired?

People don’t talk enough about how hard it is to know you’re “done” having kids after years of infertility, mostly because “done” suggests a level of certainty that infertility never really gives you.

For some of my friends, done was a feeling. A conversation that landed. A vasectomy scheduled. Boom, chapter closed. Their families felt complete in a calm, decisive way that I still find a little impressive. For me, it’s blurrier. My husband and I still pay for embryo storage, which means the question never fully goes away; it just kind of hangs out in the background of our lives. 

Every month, that charge hits my card and casually reminds me that the possibility is still there, quite literally frozen and waiting, even if I’m not totally sure what I want to do with it. And it’s not that I don’t love the life we have — I really do — but in another universe, one where groceries were cheaper and someone reliably cooked us dinner every night, I could absolutely imagine a fourth kid fitting right in. In this universe, I mostly imagine needing a nap and a personal assistant.

What I’m slowly realizing is that after infertility, certainty is hard to trust. You get used to living in “maybe,” imagining multiple futures at once, and embryo storage keeps that habit alive, turning “done” into something that feels more conditional than final.

Being done doesn’t show up as a clear decision so much as a slow realization — and honestly, after everything, there’s still a small part of me that thinks… who knows, maybe I’m pregnant right now.