The Place You Keep Saving For Someone Who Isn't Here Yet
During infertility and IVF, one of the hardest things can be watching life move forward around you, while you feel like your life is stuck on pause.
For us, that feeling can be summed up by an empty chair.
At first, it’s just an empty chair. But it’s not just any empty chair.
Somewhere along the way, you start imagining who might sit there.
At breakfast. At Christmas. In family photos. On summer holidays.
And suddenly, it isn’t just a chair anymore.
During our IVF journeys, we watched our friends’ families grow – from zero to one, one to two, and even three.
Babies arrived. First birthdays came around. Then second birthdays came around too. We were happy for them, but there was often another feeling sitting alongside it:
When will it be our turn?
Life kept moving. Another treatment. Another year. More plans made for the future, while quietly hoping that next time, there might be someone else to include in them.
IVF has a strange way of making you measure time differently.
Not just in months and years, but in cycles, transfers, birthdays and Christmases you once thought would look different.
Season after season passed.
And somehow, the chair was still empty.
The strange thing is that nobody else can see it.
To everyone else, it’s simply another seat at the table.
But to you, it holds a child you’ve already pictured. A place you’ve quietly been saving. A future you’ve been carrying in your heart for much longer than anyone realises.
That’s the invisible side of IVF.
Not just the treatment itself, but the space it quietly occupies in your heart.
Invisible IVF is our series about the parts of fertility treatment that often go unseen — the thoughts, losses, hopes and small moments you carry quietly while life around you carries on as normal.
