Sisters in Heartbreak (30 days)

I have found myself in good company in this grief of mine.

While I talk about my lost boys to no one but my counselor and sometimes my husband, I have found a network of women, my “sisters in heartbreak,” on some online forums.
What an odd world that we can find strangers from across the world who know us and understand us when we can’t relate to our friends and family just miles down the road.
These forums contain every topic you can imagine. We discuss loss and grief, menstrual cycles and ovulation, IVF and IUI’s, cervical mucous and miscarriages. We type in our own weird language of TTC (trying to conceive), IVF (in-vitro fertilization), TFMR (termination for medical reasons) CTT (carry to term) AF (menstrual cycle “Aunt Flo”) DPO (days past ovulation), etc...
We console each other in our reproductive failures and encourage the hopes and dreams of sustainable pregnancies that produce healthy babies.
Our stories are eerily similar and at the same time, oddly different.
There are the women who have been trying to conceive for years, are now reaching their mid-to-late 30’s and have decided to try IVF, only to realize the baby they wanted so much and paid so much money to conceive carried a fatal genetic disease.
There are moms like me, who went through this twice and somehow have living children who won the genetic lottery. Some have gone through the loss three or more times. Some are mothers of still born babies, mothers of children who lived  just hours or days after birth. Some are mothers who decided to terminate their much-wanted pregnancies because they knew their children would not live and would not allow them to suffer. Some are mothers who have miscarried over and over. Others are going through their fourth or fifth round of IVF, having sacrificed absolutely everything else in the pursuit of a child. Others are in the middle of the worst part — deciding what to do after a devastating prenatal diagnosis.
I read their stories, I cry with them, they cry with me. This is a club no one ever wanted to join. We are sharing experiences no one ever wants to hear about. You never know how you will be until you have gone through it yourself — this trauma to the soul.
I am luckier than some, worse off than others. I have a living child — others do not. Some have a diagnosis — I don’t. My insurance covered the exome — others don’t have insurance at all. Some get IVF in their medical package — I don’t. Some are 40+ years old — At 34,  I’m considered on the “young side” of advanced maternal age.
At the end of the day, though, we all dream the same dream — we just dream it in percentages and chances and recurrence and cycles. They hold their breath with me now in the final 30 days of my countdown. Thirty days. Thirty days.