I had been multitasking, as one does while listening to a podcast. But when I heard that line, I stopped what I was doing and turned my full attention to the voice playing in my earbuds. I rewound that part and listened again. And again.

I recognized that grief.

It isn’t always the obvious, enormous loss that breaks a heart. Sometimes it is the accumulation of moments that seemed so guaranteed, so ordinary, that I simply didn’t imagine what it would feel like if they never happened. It isn’t as straightforward as saying that not being a mother makes me sad. It is the fact that I will never know what it feels like to have my own child sleep soundly on my chest and grieving that literal weight has changed me.

Let me just say: If someone in your life has struggled with infertility, send her this interview. Send it to the woman who has spent any amount of time sitting in the sterile waiting room of a fertility clinic. While you’re at it, send it to everyone who has suggested acupuncture, a vacation, drinking less coffee, drinking more water, thinking positively, not thinking about it at all, or some other fertility hack that somehow escaped modern medicine.

Back-to-school season is a particularly strange time to be a childless woman who wanted children. Everywhere I look, there are lunchboxes, tiny sneakers, and color-coordinated school supplies. There are parents posting first-day-of-school photos, children holding handmade signs, hair freshly brushed and somehow already falling out of place. Target is a colorful minefield of notebooks, tiny scissors, and backpacks that come with matching water bottles.

And I can’t help but think: I could have been doing this.

In another version of my life, I might be helping with homework, scheduling the orthodontist, gassing up the sedan for carpool and searching for a missing rain jacket at 7:42 in the morning. I might be packing a lunch, worrying about whether my child has friends, and complaining about the logistics of school pickup.

Because infertility doesn’t just mean losing the milestones. It means losing the mundane Tuesday afternoons, the sneakers by the door, the bad drawings on the refrigerator, and the thousand other little things I never even thought to grieve.

Because infertility doesn’t just mean losing the milestones. It means losing the mundane Tuesday afternoons, the sneakers by the door, the bad drawings on the refrigerator, and the thousand other little things I never even thought to grieve.

Sara went on to talk about how many women are willing to discuss their fertility struggles once they have a healthy baby in their arms, but how much less often women talk about it while they are still going through it. I understand why. But there is also something powerful about saying it anyway, saying it before you even have the language to say what it is.

Maybe that is another kind of little loss: the things that go unspoken because they are too difficult, too awkward, or too painful to name.

I think that’s why this particular interview was so powerfully moving for me. Because in the midst of washing my face and putting on my work clothes, someone reached out and let me know they me know I’m not alone in this grief.

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Every morning, I watch the same choreography: Ben, the overweight white Lab, out for his morning walk, a choreography of SUVs, young professionals with travel mugs. At night, living room lights flicker on in a sequence that feels coordinated. I know who got a Peloton, when the ER nurse is headed into another night shift, and that the couple on the corner finally put together the nursery.

One of the neighbors, a retiree in her sixties, is learning to ride a bike. Her thirty-something son teaches her in the street, his voice alternating between instruction and frustration. She wobbles past the …

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1. At the neighborhood pool, there’s a diving board. I catch myself eavesdropping on kids as they wait in line. Make the biggest splash you can! I dare you to touch the bottom. Canonball! I forgot how magical diving boards are when you’re eight. The impossible moment of standing at the end, the board wobbling beneath your feet, your heart convinced this is a terrible mistake, but jumping anyway. Then, you sink all the way to the bottom and the world goes quiet. You trust your body knows what to do, so you kick hard, break the surface, and realize you are okay. I think about that feeling a lot lat…

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The Auntie Bulletin

On Quitting: How Sobriety Prepared Me for Infertility

Today we have a guest post from the lovely Lexi Weber Johnson, whose work I didn’t know until she reached out to me to pitch this story about sobriety, infertility, and auntiehood. I took a look at her newsletter, Not Expecting, which turned out to be really thoughtful and well-written, and I loved Lexi’s post idea, so it was an easy yes. But I didn’t realize how truly great this piece would be until she sent along a draft…

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4 months ago · 160 likes · 20 comments · Lisa Sibbett and Lexi Weber Johnson

From Lisa: Today we have a guest post from the lovely Lexi Weber Johnson, whose work I didn’t know until she reached out to me to pitch this story about sobriety, infertility, and auntiehood. I took a look at her newsletter, Not Expecting, which turned out to be really thoughtful and well-written, and I loved Lexi’s post idea, so it was an easy yes. But I didn’t realize how truly great this piece would be until she sent along a draft.

I …

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There are a handful of things people say when they find out you’re not having children. Most of them are framed as comfort, a helpful workaround, an overly optimistic pivot. What they have in common is this: they attempt to resolve something that isn’t theirs to fix.

This series is about those anti-solutions.

The Moment

You open up and say the impossible-to-bear thing out loud. The IVF failed. The embryo did not take. You lost the baby. Or some other truth that feels too heavy for language alone. Then it comes, sometimes with a hand on your arm, a slow nod, or a hopeful look: “Everything happens for a reason.”

The Logic

I understand this impulse. I really do. I was once a diligent student in the School of Everything Happens For A Reason. When something did not unfold the way I wanted, I would instinctively reach for meaning, for a lesson, for some comfort inside the pain. The search felt like stability. I thought, if there is a reason, then the experience is contained.

But what it sounds like to the person hearing it is this: you should feel differently about this because one day you will understand why it happened.

Underneath the “everything happens for a reason” line is something more universal: a discomfort with uncertainty. We want life to make sense. We want outcomes to add up. We want suffering to belong to a larger story. Because the reality that some things simply happen, full stop, is harder to bear.

The Reality

, who writes so honestly about the weight of these toxic cultural narratives, puts it plainly:

“Everything happens for a reason…The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason.”

She goes on to say how no one is ever short of reasons and perhaps that is the problem. In the rush to assign meaning, we can miss what is actually being offered to us: not a problem to solve, but an experience to witness.

When someone is speaking about loss, they are not always asking for a solution. Often, they are asking simply to be met where they are.

The Better Way To Show Up

This is where I would usually add a few lines about other things to say, but I am going to try something different here. Sometimes the most generous response is not an answer, but a willingness to stay with what is unresolved without trying to fix it.

As a recovering “everything happens for a reason” person myself, I have learned that the better instinct is often beyond words. It is presence. It is not looking away from someone else’s pain just because it is uncomfortable to watch.

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Want to keep this conversation going? Let’s talk in our subscriber-only chat.

Tell me the most common thing people say to you when they find out you don’t have children. I may write about it in a future Anti-Solution column.

Carrie is a freelance writer based in Northern California, currently writing a memoir. Her expertise is in sharing how to embrace the childfree life after infertility and the many tangents that radiate from that experience. Her trademark is vulnerable, funny, and authentic writing. After eight years of trying to conceive, multiple miscarriages, working with surrogates, and delivering her stillborn daughter, she embodies all things grief and infertility based with a side of humor to cope.

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Millions of people experience infertility, yet so much of it happens in private: the appointments, the waiting, the grief, the hope, the endless negotiations about a future that may never arrive. If you’re in that invisible space right now, I see you. Below are a few things I wish someone had leaned across the table and told me years ago.

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This is not the New Orleans of bachelor parties or frozen drinks or 3 a.m. Ubers. It is a more generous version of the city, one that welcomes you as you are and simply asks you to participate in your own life again.

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When your husband arrives at the end of your work trip, you will be pleasantly surprised by how romantic it is to reunite in a different city. At dusk, stroll together along the riverfront toward Café du Monde. The beignets will arrive hot. The cafe au lait will have the faint taste of chicory. Maybe it’s the humidity or the music playing on every street corner, but New Orleans makes it impossible not to romanticize your life a little. When a man playing sax starts a rendition of Lauryn Hill’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” you decide pleasure may be your new favorite coping mechanism.

Since it’s your first night in the city together, dinner should be unmistakably New Orleans: historic, softly lit, slightly theatrical, definitely haunted. Find a classic French Quarter restaurant where the waitress casually lets you know one upstairs table remains permanently reserved for the resident ghost. You’ll chuckle, because honestly, same. After you stop trying for a baby, the absence of one doesn’t leave.

Once you’ve eaten enough shrimp and grits, head to Bourbon Street and dance to a cover band playing “I Will Survive” long enough to remember there are versions of womanhood that involve glitter on your eyelids, sweat in your hair, and absolutely nobody asking whether you’ve “thought about adoption.”

Spend the following afternoon in the Warehouse District and eat one of the best pork sandwiches of your life, then drift in and out of art museums. Later, check into a B&B in the Marigny where ceiling fans hum and the sheets smell line-dried. Take a long nap in the middle of the afternoon without earning it first through productivity or emotional resilience. This is called growth.

That evening, walk to N7 and enter through a hidden gate into what feels like a private garden party. Candles flicker against overgrown greenery and the restaurant glows with the kind of lighting that makes everyone look like the best version of themselves. The food will arrive slowly and lovingly. Eat pommes frites under the trees and feel the unfamiliar sensation of your life not being on hold. No one tells women this, but finding joy after grief is less “Eat Pray Love” and more “siting outside eating delicious carbs while the antidepressants do their job.”

The next day, take a streetcar to the Garden District where giant oaks drip with Spanish moss and brightly colored Mardi Gras beads. Order an absurdly good sandwich at a corner dive. Walk up Magazine Street and explore the vintage shops. When you find a pair of earrings you like, don’t ask whether the purchase is “practical.” Buy them because after years of structuring every decision around your hypothetical child, it is okay to spend money on your present self. Buy the earrings because they delight you. Buy them because you want to.

If you are lucky, a thunderstorm will roll in abruptly. Wait it out in a tiny café that makes its own chocolate and is decorated like a set in a Tennessee Williams play. Sit beside your husband on a velvet loveseat and sip a chai latte as the rain pounds against the pavement.

That evening, eat dinner at an unpretentious Vietnamese spot. Because New Orleans Vietnamese food carries its own history of displacement, resilience, and rebuilding, the broth tastes like someone’s grandmother has spent all day waiting for you to arrive.

The next morning, get dressed up for brunch at Brennan’s in a way that feels excessive. Take a long shower, put on some lipstick, wear the good dress. Go to Preservation Hall for a matinee and splurge on the front row seats. Jazz, unlike infertility culture, has no interest in perfection. It values improvisation, adaptation, and returning to the melody after things fall apart a little.

Stroll down Royal Street and browse the antique shops. Eat at a dive sandwich shop that your husband picks out. Trust him even though the neon signs are flickering and the bathroom is out of order and you haven’t vetted the place. After years of infertility, you’ve discovered that control is less a personality trait and more a hobby you eventually give up because it stops being fun.

Drift through the Frenchmen Art Bazaar and chat with local artists, then cram yourself into a few clubs on Frenchmen Street. Stay for one set longer than you planned.

The next morning is Mother’s Day. Prepare for it quietly and instinctively, the same way you prepare for bad weather you know is coming. Let yourself be surprised when the day arrives soft around the edges. There is no performance required, just coffee in a chipped ceramic mug while the innkeepers tell you about the month they’re spending in Italy. Later, wander to a bookstore café a few blocks away and sit in the courtyard beneath the heavy Louisiana heat. Drink an iced lavender latte that will sweat against your palm.

If you leave the city with nothing else, leave with this: your life is not behind you because one version of it didn’t arrive. There are still bowls of gumbo waiting to be eaten, songs wanting to be danced to, and sticky, humid evenings capable of surprising you.

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Below are my recommendations for New Orleans, offered with the understanding that the city is far too expansive, layered, and alive to ever be contained in a neat list. My own experiences here have only skimmed the surface, but if you are looking for a starting point, I stand by these:

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Jade is an Australian-based journalist of 15 years who loves long podcasts and short naps. She launched her Substack, The Unexpecting Club, in 2024 to share her big and small thoughts on the frustrations, confusion, sadness and strangeness of infertility and IVF. It’s a space she hopes helps others on the journey feel seen, find solace and occasionally, have a giggle.

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I went to a spin class, which, of course, was filled with mothers and daughters taking selfies. I wandered through Marshall’s, past the faux flower bouquets and displays of #1 Mom mugs. I even went grocery shopping. It wasn’t until I was standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s that it hit me: I couldn’t keep pretending this wasn’t a painful holiday. I waited until I loaded the groceries into my car before folding over the steering wheel and crying.

If you are childless not by choice, there is no right way to move through this day.

Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many people have wished me a happy Mother’s Day, the exclamation delivered with the same reflex as “bless you” after a sneeze. It is automatic, well-meaning, and entirely unexamined. What follows is always a pause, a split second where I decide how honest I want to be, how much I want to explain, and whether I have the energy to make someone else comfortabl…

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This series is about those anti-solutions.

The thing is these solutions-that-are-not-actually-solutions-at-all reveal how uncomfortable people can be with lives that don’t follow a familiar arc. They overcorrect for that discomfort, often at someone else’s expense. What ends up being offered as comfort is actually a way of changing the subject at the exact moment someone is saying something real.

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The Anti-Solution Series is for anyone who has been on the receiving end of those one liners. If you’ve said some of these things yourself, this is for you too. There’s no need to feel guilty. Just keep reading. There are better ways to show up.

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1. I made a friend date.

I met a good friend in the communal sauna at the wellness space where we are both members. There is something incredibly vulnerable about sitting together in a dark, hot room, letting conversation come and go without pressure.

At one point, I told her I wanted to fix my nasolabial folds. I pulled at my face and puckered my lips to show her what I meant. She looked at me and said, I love that part of your face. It’s … you. Her words landed more ge…

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I had the opportunity to chat with Jenny Vincent of The Two Week Wait, who opened up about the emotional reality of infertility. She shared how IVF, losses, and the constant negotiation between hope and fear have reshaped her sense of self and her marriage. Her deeply intentional pursuit to be a mother has tested her resilience. Through candid reflection, Jenny let’s us in on the heartbreak, unexpected lessons, and small joys that have sustained her along the way.

Jenny is a mid-30s fundraiser, wife, daughter, sister, and friend who cares deeply about connecting with others and building community. She lives in Los Angeles with her wonderful husband Matt. She loves cooking without a recipe, can knit you a sweater, and lives for her daily walks. Her journey with infertility is a big part of her story, but she is finding ways every day to ensure it isn’t her whole story.

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Welcome to the Anti-Solution Series. Every month, I pull apart these well-meaning responses and examine what’s really being said.

The thing is these solutions-that-are-not-actually-solutions reveal how uncomfortable people can be with lives that don’t follow a familiar arc. They overcorrect for that discomfort, often at someone else’s expense. What ends up being offered as comfort is actually a way of changing the subject at the exact moment someone is saying something real.

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This series is for anyone who has been on the receiving end of those one liners. If you’ve said some of these things yourself, this is for you too. There’s no need to feel guilty. Just keep reading. There are better ways to show up.

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I hear it everywhere. In the way people compare suffering, dissect symptoms, and trade solutions like they might add up to something definitive. Mostly, I hear it in my own head. A constant, low-level assessment of what my body is doing, what it should be doing, and what that probably says about me.

My husband and I tried to have a baby naturally for a year before IVF. Three rounds later, we still didn’t have a healthy embryo. My eggs, my uterus, my body, all of it felt like a failure. Every negative result piled shame upon shame. As I carried it, I watched friends get pregnant. I watched their children learn to walk and speak and hold a spoon full of mashed avocado all on their own. It created a kind of panic, a persistent sense that there was a…

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A few months ago, I was trolling Zillow for homes I deemed “Not Safe for Babies.” Since then, I’ve been curious about the women walking the same path. The one where you tried for parenthood and then, one day, you’re standing in the spare bedroom that could have been a nursery, wondering what it’s going to become instead.

The name change isn’t just a rebrand. It finally captures what the newsletter is, the questions I’m asking, and the unexpected truths I’m learning about life without children. It’s intentional, honest, and a little unapologetic … just like the essays you’ll find here.

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This space is for:

• The childless who are quietly redefining what that word even means.

• The deeply happy and still sometimes grieving.

• Those figuring out how to answer the question, “So when are you having kids?”

• People pausing fertility treatments, unsure if they’ll ever resume.

• Anyone who thought they’d be a parent … and isn’t.

• People who are childfree…

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Since 2008, she’s worked at the intersection of systems, both community mental health work and in her lived experience. As the founder of Lotus Psychotherapy, Allison specializes in treating complex PTSD through modalities like Internal Family Systems (IFS), Brainspotting, and EMDR. But beyond the credentials, her work is about sitting with people in their truth and helping them reclaim a sense of wholeness — not perfection. Her clients often call her sessions “witch craft” and “woo.”

Off the clock, Allison is raising two kids and writing about the messy, beautiful contradictions of being a working mother, feminist, and healer in a world that often demands compartmentalization. She believes in holding both: the quiet joy of a session breakthrough and the chaos of morning …

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“I actually think you’re considered a DILDO now,” she said.

I took a sip of my iced matcha, expecting her to laugh. She didn’t. Instead, she clarified, “Dual Income, Little Dog Owner.”

I waited until we said our goodbyes before I opened my phone and Googled “how little does your dog have to be to qualify as a DILDO?” Almost an hour later, I was still hunched over the screen in the front seat of my car, the windows fogged up, deep in a Reddit titled Are You DINKs or DINKWADs? DINKWADs meaning Dual Income, No Kids, With A Dog.

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It turns out, there’s an entire childfree lexicon:

• SINKs (Single Income, No Kids)

• SINBADs (Single Income, No Boyfriend/Assets/Dude)

• PODWOGs (Parents of DINKs Without Grandchildren)

• DODOs (Dual income, Obsessive Doodle Owners)

I considered more fitting acronyms for my place in the infertility world:

• ATWAB (Adults That Wanted A Baby)

• POPI (Pissed Off, Processing Infertility)

• FINKs (Fertility Issues, No Kids)

• LIMBO (Living In Maybe Baby Optimism)

None of the labels fit. Not one brought me a sense of identity. Infertility drops you into a liminal space—not a parent and not childfree by choice. It leaves you with a longing, a void, a space you try to fill with something that makes the in-between feel less lonely. And that ache doesn’t disappear because you name it.

A few years ago, my husband and I were walking through Central Park. A crowd of people dressed in Medieval clothing were yelling in the distance.

“What are they doing?” I asked my husband. “Filming something?”

“They’re LARPing,” he told me.

“LARP, Live Action Role-Playing,” he continued after registering the confusion on my face. “It’s like Dungeons and Dragons stuff.”

“They look like they’re having so much fun.” I said, stopping to watch the group of strangers charge at one another with fake swords and makeshift shields. They were dashing around in velvet capes and a few of them even wore what looked like metal Viking helmets. In between sword fights and dramatic death scene reenactments, they were laughing together, high fiving, and cheering one another on.

My husband dismissed it, but I felt a pang of jealousy. I thought about community and the many ways people find that for themselves.

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My husband shrugged off the LARPers, but I found myself glancing over my shoulder once more, wanting to see them again before they slipped out of sight. They looked a little silly, yes. But they also looked…connected, part of a circle I could only watch from the outside. As if they’d found a place in the world where they didn’t have to justify who they were or who they weren’t.

For years, I’ve been calling the ache I carry “infertility,” but that word often feels too small. Maybe what I’m really missing is belonging. At some point, my friends seemed to split into two groups—the ones who wanted children and had them, and the ones who had never been interested in being parents. And I was left somewhere in between, unsure where I fit.

These labels we invent for ourselves—DINK, DILDO, DINKWAD—they try to make a complicated thing simple. They’re shorthand, quick ways of saying “I’m here” without admitting how uncertain that “here” can feel. They give us a category but not a community.

These labels we invent for ourselves—DINK, DILDO, DINKWAD—they try to make a complicated thing simple. They’re shorthand, quick ways of saying “I’m here” without admitting how uncertain that “here” can feel. They give us a category but not a community.

For me, community has always been more accidental than intentional. It hasn’t been something that has been magically granted to me, but more so something that I gathered awkwardly while stumbling my way through a new phase in life. It has shown up in church basements, clutching a paper cup of bad coffee; in a familiar face at yoga class; through small talk in a sauna; in a group chat when someone finally admitted they were scared or angry or too tired to pretend they were fine. It arrives quietly, in unexpected places, and somehow reminds me that I’m not as alone as I feel.

I want this newsletter to be one of those places. For the childfree, the childless by choice, for the DILDOs and SINKs and DODOs and everyone stuck somewhere in between—this is your corner of the internet. No labels, no hashtags, no neatly packaged identities, just messy human connection and a lot of figuring it out together.

17 Signs You’re Officially a DINKWAD … according to Reddit.

1. You’ve rearranged furniture to accommodate zoomies.

2. Your dog eats better-quality food than you did in college.

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The article examines a growing belief system in which women are encouraged to treat the months, even years, before pregnancy as a high-stakes training program for motherhood. Detox your house. Fix your microbiome. Lower your cortisol. Keep your womb warm.1 Because what you’re doing now could be disadvantaging your future child.

The promise is seductive: prepare correctly and you can outrun biology.

The truth doesn’t offer the same clickbait-worthy messaging: you can eat the liver, skip the bagel, avoid touching the receipt, stop wearing the perfume your husband got you for Christmas … and still not get a baby.

And no amount of clean living will make that your fault.

…

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I usually resist social media trends, but I found myself pulled in. I opened my photo archive and saw a young blonde woman learning to surf in Bali, holding a longboard behind her back on the beach, an ear-to-ear grin. I scrolled further: Hong Kong through a rain-streaked window. A monkey eating out of my hand in Ubud. A yoga pose in Florence’s Giardino Bardini. Jumping off rocks in Manarola. Eating fish and chips in Howth harbor outside Dublin. Catching a beach sunset out of the back of my old Jeep Cherokee.

I loved 2016. Not the politics, not the pop cultu…

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