An Infertility Journey Mixing Grief and Dreams of Motherhood

This article includes discussion of pregnancy loss and death of a parent. If you don’t want that…this may not be a good read for you.

Some of us spend years building the perfect plan, only to have the grind of daily life dismantle our plans and dreams piece by piece until we’re left staring out a hospital window, holding the wreckage, finally understanding something we couldn’t have learned any other way. That is where Hope Alcocer found herself.

The mental health coach and author came to the conversation with a story she had never told publicly before: a four-year infertility journey that wound through two miscarriages, a twin pregnancy, a placental abruption, the death of her newborn daughter, and the death of her mother three days later. But the story is not really about loss, as devastating as that loss is. It is about what happens when the human impulse to control the outcome of your own life runs straight into the wall of reality, and what becomes possible on the other side of that collision.

If you have ever white-knuckled your way through a plan because giving up felt like failing, or if you have been through something that left you wondering how a person is supposed to keep going, this conversation is for you. The tension at the center of Hope’s story is one most of us know in smaller, quieter ways: the gap between what we can engineer and what we can actually control.

“I thought, okay, we can control this,” she said. “We can control the outcome of what happens.”

She was wrong, and learning that, again and again, became the through line of the most painful chapter of her life.

When Planning Feels Like Protection

Hope Alcocer grew up knowing, more than most people, that pregnancy is not guaranteed. Her mother struggled with infertility for four years before Hope was born, undergoing treatment in the 1980s when it was rarely discussed and carried a quiet stigma. As a child, she also watched her aunt return home after a miscarriage, that particular broken expression on her face something Hope never forgot.

So when she and her husband Garrett experienced their first pregnancy, unplanned, during COVID, and then miscarried, she did not fall apart. She strategized. They would wait until they were married and settled. They would do genetic testing. They would give their bodies and their circumstances every possible advantage before trying again.

“Hindsight, I thought we can control this,” Hope said. “We can control the outcome of what happens.”

The second pregnancy ended in another miscarriage. An autopsy revealed the baby had carried an extra chromosome, something no amount of preparation or planning could have prevented. The loss had nothing to do with their genetics, nothing to do with timing or the house they’d bought or the care they’d taken.

“It was just something that happens,” Hope said, “and you can’t plan for it, you can’t control it, you can’t eat something different.”

This is the first and quietest version of the lesson: some things are simply outside the jurisdiction of effort. Most of us understand that intellectually. Very few of us believe it until we are forced to.

Carrying It Alone

What often goes unacknowledged in the infertility conversation is the particular isolation that comes with it, the way it carves out a private suffering that exists alongside ordinary family life.

Hope had three young stepchildren in the house when she came home from a second devastating ultrasound appointment. They did not know she had been pregnant. She had to walk through the door and put her grief in a box until they went back to their mother.

“Having a mask,” she said. “Trying not to just absolutely fall apart in the doorway.”

At the same time, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her mother, who had wanted to be with Hope for the surgery following the miscarriage but could not get there, who was now in treatment at the Mayo Clinic across the country. Surrounded by people who loved her, Hope was, in her own words, very much alone.

She chose to pause the fertility journey and go home to her mother, traveling back and forth for months, present for the chemotherapy, the mastectomy, the slow accumulation of treatments. She had not given up on becoming a mother. She had simply recognized where she was needed most and decided to be there.

When she returned to the East Coast and quickly became pregnant again, the news came with an additional surprise: twins. A boy and a girl.

Amy Stone asked her about the emotional weight of riding that cycle of anticipation and fear: “Tell us more about how you were riding the rollercoaster of anticipation and anxiety and fear.”

“It was difficult,” Hope said. “I was constantly holding my breath emotionally.”

The boy was lost early in the pregnancy, leaving Hope to navigate simultaneous grief and gratitude, still pregnant, still hopeful, still terrified. Blood draws two to three times a week monitored her progesterone levels, and her doctor would call with updates that required Hope to brace herself. Her husband, Garrett, who is deathly afraid of needles, learned to give her progesterone injections because that was what the situation required.

“I always say he kept the pregnancy going,” Hope said. “It bonded us.”

Everything Ready, Nothing Controlled

By the final weeks of the pregnancy, Hope’s mother had stopped responding to treatment and entered hospice. Hope was 38 weeks pregnant. Her brother moved his wedding date forward by a year so their mother could officiate. Hope was trying to manage the timing of two enormous life events, and she was doing what she had always done: trying to influence the outcome.

She ate the dates. She drank the okra water. She walked five miles. She made eggplant parmesan from a recipe three different people had told her would bring on labor. She had a playlist. She had a birthing center booked. She had postpartum meals scheduled for delivery.

On the night of her due date, she went to sleep. She woke up hemorrhaging.

A placental abruption, where the placenta separates before the baby, had cut off the baby’s oxygen. They rushed to the hospital, performed an emergency C-section. Her daughter Mia lived for two hours. The doctors told Hope that five more minutes and they would have lost her too.

Three days later, her mother died.

“This is the kind of grief that knocks people out for a lifetime,” Amy said quietly during the conversation.

Hope didn’t disagree. But she also described what happened in the hospital room in the hours after Mia died, before her mother had even passed, while she was still recovering from emergency surgery.

“I look at Garrett,” she said. “We had everything planned. We had the birthing center booked. I had my playlist. And I just said — we don’t control anything.”

She caught herself. The one remaining em dash in that direct quote is Hop’s own words and how she said it, so it stays as written above. If you’d prefer to render it differently in the published version, you could use: “And I just said: we don’t control anything.”

What Radical Acceptance Actually Feels Like

The phrase “letting go of control” gets used so often it has nearly lost its meaning. It shows up on candles and Instagram captions. It is easier to say than to understand. Hope knows this. She had heard the term radical acceptance so many times in the six months following Mia’s death that, as she put it, she could have taken a shot every time someone mentioned it.

But she also knows, from the inside, what the concept actually requires.

“Radical acceptance is a routine decision I have to make,” she said. “Grief is not linear. The stages of grief, I’ve gone through a couple of them a couple times already.”

It is not a single moment of release. It is a practice, repeated in the middle of ordinary days. Hope described a physical gesture she uses when something arises that she cannot control, a deliberate motion, even when she is alone in the house, paired with the acknowledgment: can’t control it. She let go of her long-standing germophobia in a household with three children constantly cycling through school illnesses. She stopped burning energy on traffic.

These are small examples, and she knows they are small compared to what she has been through. But they point to the larger shift, a reorientation toward what is actually available to us when we stop pouring effort into the things that were never ours to manage.

“Not knowing that I can’t control anything, I already knew that,” she said. “Like, everyone says that. But truly, like, we can’t control anything. It has been very freeing.”

She is quick to say she is still deeply hurting. She feels, she said, like a part of her died when Mia died. The pain and the freedom exist at the same time. That is the more nuanced version of the lesson, and the one that is hardest to hold.

“Two things can be true at the same time,” Hope said. “I am still deeply hurting. And it has been very freeing. I can hold both feelings.”

The Choice Inside the Uncontrollable

There is a kind of grief that does not resolve. It changes shape, it becomes something you learn to carry rather than something you set down. What Hope Alcocer found, in the wreckage of a year that took more than most people will ever lose, is not a cure for that grief. It is something quieter and more durable: the recognition that how we respond to what we cannot control is the only place where our agency actually lives.

The infertility journey forced her into that lesson by inches, the first miscarriage, the second, the genetic testing that came back clear, the progesterone levels that fluctuated and dropped. Each moment was another small proof that preparation is not the same as control. The larger losses finished the education.

“Whatever comes at us,” she said, “we have a choice in how we’re going to react to the uncontrollable.”

This is not the same as saying everything happens for a reason, or that grief should be hurried along, or that acceptance means approval. It means something simpler and harder: that life is short enough, and unpredictable enough, that what we do with the space between what happens and how we respond is all we really have.

Hope opened that hospital window. She looked at her husband. She let the plan go.

She is still figuring out what comes next, and she is doing it, which is something.

This article was inspired by an interview with Hope Alcocer and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. https://imperfect-adulting.captivate.fm/listen or https://www.youtube.com/@imperfectadulting To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.