From Infertility to Infinity: How God Wrote Our Story

If you’ve ever lived through infertility, you already know this: it’s not just a medical condition. It’s a whole life season. It’s the calendar reminders, the timed blood work, the hormone injections, the pharmacy receipts, the early morning ultrasounds before work, the awkward exam tables, and the silent prayers on the bathroom floor where you stare at one pink line instead of two.

Those pink lines feel so tiny, and yet they carry the weight of the whole month.

For seven years, I lived in that cycle. Hope, treatment, symptoms, waiting, testing, heartbreak, reset, repeat. My body told a story every month that no one else could see. I carried bruised skin from injections and bruised emotions from expectations that kept collapsing on themselves. And every loss felt like its own little funeral—a child we loved but never got to hold here.

Infertility did steal something from me. I will never pretend it didn’t.

It stole years that I cannot get back. It stole babies we never got to rock. It stole the innocence of dreaming without fear. It stole plans I thought were straightforward and predictable.

I did not “just lose time.” I lost layers of myself along the way, and those layers mattered. Infertility is grief even when it’s quiet, even when no one else knows, even when the only proof is a sharps container and a crumpled test wrapper.

So when I say infertility hurt, that is an understatement.

When Motherhood Showed Up Differently

And then one day, without any guarantees and without any biological connection, three little boys came into our home through foster care.

Motherhood did not arrive gently or predictably. It arrived as three car seats, three bedtime routines, three sets of tiny pajamas and toothbrushes and snack cups, and three children who needed fierce, immediate love long before anyone could tell us what the future would hold.

There were visitations, therapy appointments, caseworker meetings, biological family questions, and court dates where your heart pounds harder than your pulse. The paperwork, the unknowns, the timelines, the waiting—it’s a whole world of love without permanence yet.

Someone once asked me, “How do you love children without knowing if they’ll stay?”

And the truth is: you love them the moment they’re in your home. You don’t wait for the judge to sign a paper before treating them like your own.

You’re already up at night when they’re sick. You’re already cheering at therapy sessions. You’re already singing the same bedtime songs and washing the same favorite blanket because they can’t sleep without it. You’re already invested, heart and soul, before you ever know if your heart will break later.

That’s foster care. It is motherhood in real time, without the security net.

And somewhere in those early months, during bedtime stories and one more cup of water and “just one more snuggle,” we started saying:

“I love you to infinity and beyond.”

At first, it was just a fun Toy Story line because they loved Buzz Lightyear and could quote the entire movie if given the chance. But like all simple family phrases, it rooted itself into our rhythm.

Every night, the boys would stretch their arms as far as they could, like they could physically measure infinity if they tried hard enough. And I would watch them and think:

“They don’t even realize how big that word is.”

But I did.

Because love that enters without guarantees is infinite in a way I never understood before foster care.

We said “I love you to infinity and beyond”:

• before adoption

• before permanency

• before we knew what forever would look like

We said it because love comes before answers.

The Words That Changed How I See My Story

Much later, after everything we had walked through, I was journaling one night, and I wrote the word:

infertility

That word used to sit heavy, like a period at the end of a sentence. A closed door. A final chapter I didn’t choose.

And a little later in the same journal, I wrote:

infinity

Not because they’re the same word or because the letters magically rearrange—they don’t. But visually, side by side, I noticed something that stopped me for a moment:

Infertility....Infinity

Same beginning.

Same rhythm.

Same look on the page.

And sitting there, I felt God whisper something into my heart—not to erase my pain, not to rewrite history, but to help me understand something I didn’t see when infertility was the only word I could feel:

I lived for years inside the word infertility. But God was always holding infinity.

Not infinity like a cute phrase. Not infinity like a bedtime slogan.

Infinity like His character — unending love, unending mercy, unending goodness, unending plans.

Infertility did not turn into infinity.

God’s infinite love stepped into the space infertility left behind.

Infertility didn’t give me my children. Infinity didn’t either.

God did — through His infinite grace, through a story I never could have scripted, through doors I never expected to walk through, and through children I never expected to meet this side of heaven.

What I Lost and What I Gained

I will never say infertility didn’t cost me anything. It cost me deeply.

And I will never say my children “made the pain worth it” as if loss disappears once new life arrives. That isn’t how grief works.

I still carry the memory of babies I never held. I still carry the ache of years spent waiting. I still remember every negative test, every appointment, every night crying quietly so no one would hear.

Those things mattered.

But what infertility could not steal was God’s ability to write a story bigger than biology, bigger than my plans, bigger than timelines, and bigger than my expectations.

My boys made me a mother before adoption said I officially was. My daughter arrived as a miracle after so much loss I cannot count. My motherhood did not erase my infertility, but it sits beside it and redeems it in ways only God could orchestrate.

If someone handed me a form today and said I could go back and redo those seven years without the heartbreak, without the waiting, without the miscarriages, without the unknowns, and still arrive exactly where I am now…

I genuinely don’t know that I would sign it.

Not because the pain was easy — it wasn’t.

But because every tear, every unanswered prayer, every aching month carved room in my heart for a deeper kind of motherhood than I ever understood before.

And I don’t want the version of me who never learned that.

If You’re Still in the Middle of It

If infertility is where you are right now…

If you’re staring at tests alone in a bathroom or sitting in a waiting room feeling like the only one without answers or carrying grief that no one else can see…

I want to tell you this with gentleness:

Your pain is not silly. Your waiting is not wasted. Your tears are seen by God more tenderly than you realize.

Infertility may feel like the entire book, but it is not the final word over your life.

Not because motherhood always follows infertility, but because God’s goodness is infinite whether your story unfolds through pregnancy, adoption, foster care, spiritual motherhood, or miracles you cannot see yet.

God is not limited by biology. He is not intimidated by timelines. He is not threatened by loss.

He meets you in the waiting, He meets you in the disappointment, and He meets you in infinity — the part of His heart that has no ending.

Our Bedtime Tradition

Every night, when we tuck our children into bed — our three boys who came to us through foster care, plus our miracle daughter whose heartbeat I thought I’d never get to hear — they still say the same words:

“I love you to infinity and beyond.”

They think it’s a Toy Story line.

I know it’s a reminder:

that infertility didn’t have the last word, and God’s infinite love stepped into the story in a way I never could have written on my own.

Not to erase the loss, but to show me: love can live where biology didn’t. And families can be built in ways far beyond anything I ever dared to hope for.

And maybe that’s the real lesson:

Infertility broke my heart, but God’s infinite love rebuilt my life.

Not perfectly.

Not painlessly.

But beautifully.

And every time a child in my house shouts, “I love you to infinity and beyond!”

I whisper in my heart:

“I know, baby. God did that. Every bit of it.”

If we were sitting together right now…

I’d take your hand and tell you:

Whatever chapter you’re in, whatever hope you’re clinging to, whatever grief you carry quietly,

God sees you. God loves you. And His story for you is bigger than the word infertility.

Not smaller than it, not dismissive of it, but bigger.

Infertility is real. Infinity is realer.

And God is the One who holds both.