Tomorrow I'm scheduled for an induction.

This is my third pregnancy, but the first baby I'll be bringing home.

During this long journey of child loss, secondary infertility and now coming full-term with a baby, there's a question that I haven't been able to answer until now:

When does motherhood begin?

Nothing matters more in this life than how you see yourself and how you see others. When I first met your dad, I had only a few years' practice in seeing the good in myself. Up until then, I had lived my life with a crippling fear of impending doom. Something was always coming to get me because—the prevailing messages insisted—I was inherently evil and prone to wickedness.

How we see human nature is directly connected to how "workable" life's hardest situations appear. If we see ourselves as fundamentally flawed, doomed to fail or on the fast track to damnation, this sends a harmful message that reverberates in every area of our existence. It implies that because we are made of badness at the core of who we are, then bad things and bad behaviors are naturally at home in us—almost as if they're unavoidable. It sends a message that we are somehow conditioned and inclined and supposed to be lonely, afraid, mistreated, yelled at, depressed, talked down to, neglected, ridiculed and so forth.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I had to unlearn as an adult. About how life was presented to me in such rigid absolutes that it crippled my inner creativity and confidence. I've been thinking about how much I want to give my daughter an expansive, open world that doesn't need to be feared or labeled or tied down.

I've also been wondering how much of what has settled into the cave of my heart will be transformed once I bring a baby home from the hospital. It's possible that everything I am trying to write down will prove to be foolish and quite laughable once I have joined the ranks of the chronically sleep deprived. So perhaps, at a minimum, we'll all get a good laugh out of what I think is worth writing down today. Regardless of whether or not I am foolish, this is the work of a woman who's in a contemplative phase of life after decades of inner upheaval.

If you ask anyone who's encountered infertility, they'll probably tell you the exact same thing:

There's so much we didn't know.

Infertility is a diagnosis no one wants, and no one wants to talk about. At least, I know I felt like talking about it would make it more possible for the infertility goblins to come find me.

As part of National Infertility Awareness Week, I want to introduce you to a term I discovered last summer:

"secondary infertility."

This is infertility that shows up AFTER you've become pregnant successfully without any medical interventions like IUI, IVF or medical boosters like ovulation shots. This means that for some reason, your body was able to get pregnant once (or many times) before, but now something has changed, and it's just not happening.

I've been pregnant twice in my life. And both times it was "like clockwork." We tried once the first time and were pregnant. We tried once the second time and were pregnant. Both times felt like miracles because I'm intimately acquainted with my friends' infertility journeys. I knew then what I know now: it's a goddamn miracle to get pregnant.

my dad wakes up early every day

so he can sit on the porch

and watch the sunrise.

he’s been leaning back in the same

rod iron chair since I was small enough

to sit in his lap.

If someone wanted to know what Texas is like

I’d tell them it smells like warm grass clippings

touched by a blanket of dew each morning.

Texas is where the scent of rain lingers for days after the storm has passed.

I used to think that true love was just for people with significant others. Based on everything I had read in books and seen in movies, true love showed up after you had suffered for a very long time. True love seemed like something far away from me, something to be earned once I had paid my dues or figured out how to be normal.

In my 20s, I was on every online dating app. In my spare time, I was reading psychology books on relationships and healing and attachment styles and dissociative disorders. I was really committed to this idea that true love was “out there” in the future, “out there” in a healthy family and so on.

This made it really hard to see that true love was actually all around me.