'I thought I had accepted my infertility. Then my boss made a comment.'

This article was originally published on Medium.

Two months ago, I asked my boss for permission to work from home temporarily because I'd taken on caregiving duties for a family member. She immediately said yes. Then, quite unexpectedly, she gave me a hug and said, "You are so caring and loving. You would be such a great mum."

She's a proud mum of four, so I know her words came from a place of affection and heartfelt intentions.

She also didn't know that I couldn't be a mum to biological children.

It's been more than a decade since I found out, and in the intervening years I've made my peace with it to varying degrees. But at moments like these — when my guards were down from exhaustion and worry — that too-familiar ball of anger, sorrow, resentment and shame rose up my throat.

I'd always thought I would have kids. I was ready to be a mum once I turned 30. I even had names picked out; if she was a girl, she'd be named after my grandmother. If a boy, my grandfather.

My ex-partner and I discussed the type of parents we'd be. Where we'd want our kids to go to school. We had family in different countries, so we planned for Christmas holidays to be with his family and summer school vacation to be with mine.

Unfortunately, after one particularly devastating visit to the doctor's at age 31, I discovered that none of this was going to be possible.

The next few years were emotionally chaotic and confusing. My inner world became unbearably turbulent; its foundations shaken by the four horsemen of anger, resentment, sorrow and shame galloping violently across my mind.

When I was angry, my mind clouded with blame and darkness — why didn't earlier doctors notice this issue? Why wasn't my partner as affected as I was, the uncaring jerk! Why is society so obsessed with babies and having kids and why is baby and kid stuff EVERYWHERE?!

I resented my own body, which I felt in some illogical way had betrayed me. My body was a loathsome stranger, this uncooperative circuitry of nerves and flesh and internal organs that didn't want to do what it was supposed to do.

And usually after the high of strong feelings came the crashing, depressive ones. The debilitating sadness, the shame. I didn't know how to tell anyone. To this day, only one family member knows why I never had kids. Everyone else thinks I'm childfree by choice. I put up with years of the occasional wink-nudge, "So when's it your turn?" from nosy relatives, because that was more bearable than looks of pity or anyone wanting to have a "sympathetic chat".

At times, though, I entered strange, still pools of calm acceptance. It is what it is, right? I even looked up adoption procedures and shared them with my unenthusiastic ex-partner.

Eventually, we broke up, and because I couldn't afford to raise a kid on my own, I shelved the adoption ideas.

And slowly, slowly, as the years chugged along, those still pools of calm acceptance widened into a lake, and then a quiet sea, mostly undisturbed and unruffled.

It became easier to accept invitations to baby showers and children's birthdays, and soon I could even begin to look forward to them. The thorny pricks of pain from looking at baby announcements on social media faded, and then turned into genuine joy. The baby-shaped wounds in my heart slowly healed and calloused.

The pain is still there, but it's now deeply buried under the life that I've built for myself over the past decade. It's a life of real, authentic happiness. I have a dog and two cats that I pour my maternal love into; my best friend asked me to be her child's god-mum and I accepted, and try my best to play a supportive role in her life; I have nephews and nieces that I adore, who think I'm the "cool aunt" with the many pets.

I travel as much as I can, do well at my job, and volunteer at an eldercare centre.

Life has been rewarding and blessed, and I am much more stable and settled emotionally.

But sometimes, that missing piece resurfaces at unexpected moments, like when my boss made her well-intentioned comment. The tectonic plates shift and send up an ominous, disturbing rumble of pain — but luckily, the foundations I've built over the years hold firm, and I'm able to regain my emotional stability quickly.

One other key contributor to my healing in the past years comes from recent research that have provided better understanding of the emotional state I went through. There's even a name for it: "ambiguous loss".

This comes from the work of psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb and psychologist Guy Winch. Last year I listened to a wonderful, profound podcast episode they hosted: Diane's Infertility Struggle. They discussed the case of Diane, who had been struggling with pregnancy loss and infertility. She asked for advice on how to deal with her grief, as well as the envy and guilt she feels about friends' and family's pregnancy announcements.

Gottlieb and Winch described Diane's feelings as ambiguous loss — a complicated, complex type of grief. It's a difficult emotion because it's a loss that doesn't occur around death, yet it can evoke equally profound depths of sorrow.

It's often invisible, too. Without the social rituals of acknowledgement and healing that come with death, people around someone feeling ambiguous loss might not know how to comfort them; often they might not even know their loved one is suffering from it.

For someone who wants but can't have a child, this loss has an added dimension of pain, as it's something that you're reminded of every day:

And the other thing about this kind of loss is that you have to face it every day, in the sense of you walk out onto the street and there are babies and there are pregnant women, and you're walking down the aisles of Target, and you think you're just going for the things that you need but oop, there's the diaper aisle and look at these women there, and you want to where maybe you do burst into tears in public and nobody knows this internal struggle that you're experiencing.

Lori Gottlieb

The 30-something me would have wept with relief if she had known that there was a name, a sense of understanding and empathy, and even a legitimate reason, for what she was going through.

That she wasn't weak and bitter for not being able to "get over it" quickly. That she wasn't a jealous, bad friend for dreading her friends' baby showers and children's birthdays. That her body wasn't deficient, damaged or dysfunctional because she couldn't have a child.

She would have been consoled to know that there are many other approaches to motherhood, besides birthing or adopting a child. She might have found comfort to know that one can be very loving and maternal towards other children and animals, even if one isn't "literally" a mother.

Most of all, I think the 30-something me would have been proud that after my boss told me, "You would be such a great mum", I was able to return her kind words with a genuine smile and a word of thanks, and a reassuring whisper to myself in my heart: "I am a great mum."

To read more from Julia Elsie, check out her Medium page here.

Feature image: Getty Images.