There is a particular silence in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics. I learned it first in Bulgaria, and later, in another language, in Turkey. It is the silence of women holding a folder on their knees and a hope they don't dare say out loud. They carry it carefully, the way you carry a glass filled to the brim.
When we began, I thought the hardest part would be the waiting. I was wrong. At first, the hardest part was the language. Nobody had told us that this road has a dictionary of its own. Stimulation protocol. Antagonist. Trigger. AMH, FSH, estradiol. Follicles counted and measured in millimetres. Blastocyst. Grades that looked like school marks — 4AA, 3BB — which we read again and again late at night, as if the letters could tell us who you would become.