My name is Amira. I’m Algerian, raised in Oran. I don’t really know how to start this so I’m just going to start.
I had my first daughter, Yasmine, when I was twenty-three. Natural pregnancy, no complications, she came into this world loud and perfect and I thought — okay, this is easy. This is what my body was made for. I had no idea that thought would come back to haunt me.
Her father and I didn’t last. That’s a whole other story. What matters is I was a single mom, I was fully responsible for her and honestly? Those years were hard but they were mine. Yasmine and I figured things out together. She’s fifteen now and somehow, through all the chaos and the changes, she still grabs my hand when we’re walking and says ‘mama you’re my person.’ I don’t take a single second of that for granted.
Then I met my now husband. And I fell — I mean I really fell. He was patient and funny and he loved Yasmine like she was already his. We got married in 2019 and I remember thinking, we’re going to fill this apartment with kids. We talked about three, maybe four. He’s from a big family, I’m from a big family, it just felt obvious.
And then month after month — nothing happened.
I don’t think I can explain what that does to you when you’ve already been pregnant once. Because everyone, including the little voice in your own head, says well you did it before so what’s wrong with you now. And I really started to believe that. That something in me had broken. That maybe I didn’t deserve it a second time. I know how that sounds. But that’s where I went. Dark places when the rest of the house was asleep.
I never said any of this to my husband, not really. I smiled. I always said soon God will bless our family. I made jokes about the tests. But inside I was crumbling because I felt like I was failing him. Like he had married a woman who couldn’t give him what he wanted. He never — not once — said anything like that to me. But the guilt wrote its own story and I believed it completely.
Eventually we decided to see a specialist. That’s when we found out I had PCOS, and apparently it had gotten worse over the years. So we tried everything. Medication. Diet changes. Things I found at three in the morning on forums full of women who were quietly going through the exact same thing. And slowly, without me even realizing it, we were running out of options. Until the doctor said the one word I had been dreading. IVF.
I cried in the parking lot. My husband just held me and didn’t say a word. That was exactly what I needed.
Two rounds. The first one failed. And I’m not going to dress that up — it was devastating in a way that made me feel stupid for being so devastated because some women go through so much more. But grief doesn’t really compare itself, does it. It just is what it is.
The second round worked.
She was born on May 1st 2023. We named her Aya — which in Arabic means Miracle — because that’s genuinely what she was. Every injection, every appointment, every hormone that made me cry at a TV commercial, every moment I wanted to give up and pretend I was fine with what we had — all of it was her coming to us the long way around.
Yasmine calls her “my baby” and I just stand there sometimes watching them. This fifteen year old who I fought so hard for, holding this little one I fought even harder to bring here — and my chest gets so tight I can’t breathe. Because they are both my miracles. Just two very different kinds of fight.
I still have hard days. The postpartum exhaustion is real even after almost 3 years. Some nights I lie there thinking about all the months I wasted hating my own body and I wish I could go back and be kinder to myself. My body was trying. It just needed more help than I expected.
Aya is proof of that. But so is Yasmine. Both my miracles. Both my daughters. Both my answered prayers.For every woman who is still waiting — still injecting, still hoping, still pretending you’re fine at baby showers when you’re breaking inside — I want you to hear this. Your pain is real. Your longing is not weakness. And the fact that you keep going, keep trying, keep loving through all of it? That is the strongest thing I have ever witnessed. Don’t give up on your body. Don’t give up on your story. It isn’t over. Aya came to me the long way around, and she was worth every single hard thing. Yours is coming too. Keep the door open.
Love, Amira
@Amira, this kind of honesty is rare and precious — thank you for trusting me with it, because the woman who needed these words will know exactly who she is when she reads them.
