Every fertility journey is different. What they share, often, is the silence, the sense of moving through something immense without a community who fully understands. When one family found JFF, they wrote about what it meant. They’ve given us permission to share their words here, anonymously, in the hope that someone else who needs them will find them.
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What We Carried
Written by Anonymous
Nobody told us there was an organization for this.
That’s not a criticism. It’s just the truth of how infertility works. You move through it mostly in private, assembling information in fragments, figuring out what exists only when someone hands you a piece of it. And for a long time, we didn’t know that the Jewish Fertility Foundation existed. That it had come to Detroit. That someone, somewhere, had looked at what Jewish families navigating infertility actually needed and decided to build something that met all of it at once.
Infertility is a specific kind of grief. It doesn’t announce itself with a date you can mark on a calendar. It accumulates. Month after month, appointment after appointment, hope raised and then quietly set aside, until you develop a whole private vocabulary for something the people around you can’t fully see. You learn to manage the gap between what’s happening inside you and what’s visible on the outside. You get good at it. Too good, maybe.
What JFF offered us wasn’t one thing. That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t needed it.
There was the grant. Real financial support, practically and concretely, in the way that financial support matters when you’re making decisions about your family’s future under pressure that doesn’t let up. Fertility treatment is expensive in ways that are hard to fully prepare for, and the grant didn’t just help with the cost. It communicated something. It said, ” This is worth supporting. Your family is worth building. We’re in this with you.”
But it wasn’t only the grant.
There was the phone call. I don’t remember every word. I remember the feeling of it: the person on the other end wasn’t moving through a checklist. They weren’t processing an application. They were present with us. They knew what this was because this organization was built by people who have lived it, some of them now working inside it, carrying their own journeys into the work. That combination, knowing and caring, is not something you can manufacture. You feel it immediately when it’s real.
There was the knowledge that support groups existed. That a Fertility Buddies® program existed. That someone had looked at every layer of what this experience costs, financially, emotionally, practically, and had tried to meet each one. We didn’t use every resource. But knowing they were there changed something. It made the isolation smaller.
JFF formed a kind of net, one you don’t always know is there until you need it, and when you need it, it holds.
The period between finding out we were expecting and holding our child was not straightforward. Every moment carried weight. Hopeful and terrifying, sometimes in the same breath.
There’s a concept in Jewish thought: bitachon. Usually translated as trust or faith. But it’s not passive. It’s not the insistence that everything will be fine. It’s the decision to keep going anyway. To keep hoping. To keep showing up for the thing you want when you have no guarantee it’s coming.
Bitachon is not the absence of fear. It’s the choice you make inside it.
We kept making it.
Every hard moment that came before was worth it. I know that sentence can sound like something people say. I mean it the way you mean something when you’ve lived the full distance between the before and the after, and you’re standing on the other side with evidence in your arms.
Worth it. All of it.
I’m writing this anonymously, but not in secret.
I want anyone reading this who is somewhere in the middle of their own journey to know that JFF exists. That you can call them. That the people who answer know what this is. That financial support is available, and so is something harder to name: the specific relief of being seen by an organization that was built for exactly this, by people who have lived it.
And I want the people who held us to know that it landed.
You held something open for us when we needed it most.
We walked through.
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If you’re somewhere in the middle of your own journey, JFF is here. Financial grants, emotional support, community programming, and one-on-one connection are all available. Visit our website to learn more.
