“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”

— Derek Walcott, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

I have many times equated my, well lack of fertility, diagnosis with the breaking of a vase–feeling as though everything that held my life together was shattered–like my favorite vase that used to hold bright purple spring tulips was carelessly scooted off a table onto the hard slate floor and broken into a thousand pieces before my very eyes.

These days I am beginning to slowly see that the love between my husband and I, which is reassembling the fragments, is perhaps much stronger than the symmetry between us, which existed before.

Infertility can place a strain on a marriage, can force conversations you thought you may never have, and can potentially create a gapping space between two people who were tightly woven together before.

Yet, if we carefully reassemble ourselves, our lives, our dreams about how those lives will play out on the great stage in front of us, we may just find that the superglue of infertility has created a vase so indestructible that even a good shove onto a cold unforgiving floor won’t cast it into shards.

Surely the task can feel paramount somedays as our fingers stick together from the glue, and we argue about which piece is suppose to go where. Yet, I find myself wondering if in breaking, we together aren’t making a new whole that will reflect light and hold God’s creation even better than the one before.