I Know What It Is to Lean Forward and Lose

For the woman who has hoped her way through another round — and is sitting in that silence again.

I used to imagine what it would feel like to watch my own sons on that mat.

I didn’t get to find out for over a decade. But I have spent years in those stands for other people’s kids — heart pounding, hands clasped, leaning forward as if they were my own. And somewhere in all those matches, I started to notice something about what hope looks like in a person’s body when the score is close.

She leans forward.

All the way forward. Hands clasped, breath held, every muscle pulled toward that mat. The crowd becomes noise. The clock becomes everything. . The score climbs, and she lets herself—carefully, quietly—believe. This could be the round. This could be the one.

And then — the shift. The counter she didn’t see coming. The whistle.

They lost.

Again.

She walks to her car in a silence I think you might recognize. That particular silence that only comes from having let yourself believe, fully, that this time would be different.

Friend, I have walked to that car too.

Not from a gymnasium. From a bathroom. From a doctor’s office. From 3 a.m. Month after month, round after round, for nearly a decade.

I know that silence in my bones. And I am not writing to you from the other side of it, cleaned up and resolved. I am sitting right here beside you, reaching back a hand.

Nobody Warned Me About

It was never that the hope ran out. It was that it kept coming back.

Maybe you have noticed this too. The window opens, and something in you stirs — almost against your will. The timing lines up. The symptoms feel different. The line is faint but there — and before you can stop yourself, you are leaning forward in those stands. Hands clasped. Breath held.

You told yourself you wouldn’t hope this much this time. You told yourself you had learned better. And still, here you are. Hoping this much.

I want you to hear me say this gently and clearly: that is not a weakness in you. That longing you cannot seem to turn off — it is real, it is holy, and it belongs to you. You did not do anything wrong by hoping.

The Losing Doesn’t Get Easier

The losing doesn’t get easier just because you’ve done it before. Each round carries the weight of every round before it. I think you know that more than anyone.

And then — it doesn’t hold. Again. The test. The call. The cramps. Another month. Another round. Another walk.

What I could never quite explain to the people who loved me — the ones who had never sat in those particular stands — is that it doesn’t get easier with practice. In some ways, each round is heavier than the last, because it carries the weight of every round before it. The losses accumulate in a way that doesn’t show on the outside. You look fine to the world. You are not.

And somewhere along the way, the question that lived quietly lived in the back of your mind moves to the front:

What if this is just… how it goes for me?

I am not going to rush past that question today. It deserves more than a quick answer, and you deserve more than someone patching it over with a verse and a bow.

Next week, I want to sit with you in Hannah’s story

Hannah asked that same question in the temple, out loud, and God did not look away from her. I believe He is not looking away from you either.

But today, I just want you to know that someone has sat where you are sitting. Someone has walked that parking lot. Someone understands that the grief of infertility is invisible in a way that makes it lonelier, and that some days the hardest thing you do is simply show up to another round.

You are not alone in this — not even close.

Part Two — The Match Is Not Over — next week. Come back when you’re ready.