When, for various reasons, I had to disclose what I was doing to doctors, or friends, or even strangers, I often had to clarify that I wasn’t trying for a child, just the chance to have one. Nurses met me with joy and encouragement. Fellow patients in the fertility clinic smiled at me like we were all in some secret hopeful club, all meeting in the same infertility Facebook groups and navigating the stress of learning how to do injections together. But for me, this wasn’t a cause for celebration, or even hope, it was a sobering reminder of the way my body would be changing over the next year, a hesitant gesture toward a future I wasn’t sure I’d be there to experience. In addition to the burden of the cost and the responsibility of the process, I was also keenly aware of the weight of what it meant to let myself hope for something that I had always wanted, and now might not be able to have, regardless of the quality of my eggs.