How Do You Know When To Stop Trying For A Baby? I became obsessed with one woman’s essay to help me figure it out.

On my screen, right there in simple, bold font, my deepest fear stared back at me: What If You Can’t Have A Baby? 

I was only weeks away from starting my first round of IVF, slouched in my usual seat at the clinic, and as my eyes darted over the words it felt as though the universe had tracked me down, found a way to present me with the one existential threat I couldn’t bear to consider. At only 32, with infertility that was unexplained—same as the very woman I was reading about—I had remained defiantly hopeful, wholly sure a baby was coming. 

Except. What if it wasn’t. 

If you look hard enough there are maybe a handful of microscopic corners of the internet where everyone—the people featured, those conversing in the comments—feels like a friend. And in this particular safe haven the friend telling her story was Mara, describing a path uncannily symmetrical to my own. Our shared diagnosis, all the holistic and medical measures she’d pursued before arriving at IVF, the way none of her loved ones seemed to grasp any of it, how it commandeered every tiny crevice of her life. Each paragraph reflected pain I knew by heart, yet the conclusion it had led her to was beyond what my brain could make sense of.  

There were differences in our experiences too, of course. Tim and I were two years into this mess; Mara and her husband were ten. She knew with certainty that adoption wasn’t right for them; we had not yet seriously considered it. But those details all seemed a product of our respective coordinates on this long, strange, terrible road. She was simply farther along the path than me, deeper in the woods. To read that from where she stood, despite her boundless desire for a baby, the life she could most clearly picture was one without children—it was downright radical. 

Knowing when to walk away from anything has always struck me as impossibly complicated, maddeningly subjective. The bubbling friction in a relationship? Fight through, surely there’s a stronger bond on the other side. The thankless job you dread? You’re paying your dues, inching toward a promotion when all will change for the better. The promise of what might be waiting around the corner holds such a powerful allure, all the weightless what ifs of tomorrow. 

It was both privilege and happenstance that gave me the best insurance coverage of my life during the period in which I was struggling with infertility, so I knew the financial burden—impossible for so, so many—would not be what forced me to stop. But then, what would? I tried to imagine a certainty powerful enough to outweigh the deep, primal longing of biology. What would silence the insistent voice inside, the one whispering just one more round? When my day came—if it came—would I be like Mara, brave enough to walk away?

As Mara was ceasing fertility treatment, I propelled myself through it, racing around a hellish boardgame, loop after loop of blood draws and acupuncture appointments before always being sent back to Start. In the quiet of my empty apartment I’d scroll fertility message boards, search the internet for an essay in which I might recognize myself, before returning to Mara’s wisdom, the most clear-eyed and truthful account out there. I found a strange, cathartic comfort in the bluntness with which she made her points, her palpable sadness. And as the months passed, the depth of my pain reflected hers ever closer. Our first round of IVF failed. Then our second, our third, our fourth. Would I know when to walk away? 

The words in Mara’s story never changed, of course, but over time, the way I read them did. I began to notice not the choice she’d made but the fact that she’d had a choice to make at all. With each week and month and twist and turn, infertility was robbing me of all meaningful control over my body and life. But here was a woman with agency, reclaiming her power. A doctor did not tell her when to stop. Her body did not tell her when to stop. She decided. The prospect, to someone whose entire world seemed beyond her own grasp, felt transgressive—electrifying. 

In the end, my story played out differently than Mara’s, but also, I did know when I’d had enough. After our fifth round of IVF, when two genetically tested embryos failed to result in a baby, a voice inside began to echo: my soul is ready to be done. I heard these words, but I also felt them, with a resounding clarity that was impossible to ignore. So, Tim and I made a final plan; we would do a frozen embryo transfer, followed by one last stimulation and fresh transfer after that. And then we would cease treatment altogether. Then, somehow, just as we were gliding toward the off-ramp, it finally worked. I was staring at two pink lines, right there in my hand. We were going to have a baby. 

A decade has passed, that baby is now in fourth grade, but I’ve not forgotten about Mara. I think about her heroic ability to hold sadness alongside resolve, her openness to discovering a life that was not the one she’d imagined but the one that was hers. I think about the hope she gave me that even inside an existence you’ve been too afraid to examine, she, I, all of us, can be ok. I hope she is.