My husband and I like to joke that we almost had a threesome on a trip to Dublin. It’s a fun dinner party anecdote to playfully shock our friends, all open-minded people, but most in heterosexual monogamous relationships. “No!” they exclaim, and we beam with delight. In this moment we’re the adventurous ones, the uninhibited. But of course, we didn’t have the threesome. We might have though, we like to tell ourselves.

We were on the trip to distract ourselves from fertility issues, something we had been struggling with for years. In early 2019 I underwent surgery, my abdomen sore for weeks after and the scar still present three years later. I was channeling my anxieties into work. It was the one area of my life where I seemed to still exercise some sense of control, the owners of the company hinting at a promotion. I took on more work. During a two-day training I was leading for a client, my husband texted me, asking that I call him. I stepped outside on a break and he let me know he had been let go. I went back to the hotel ballroom, briefly confided in my coworker what was going on, and continued the presentation. I stood before this group of doctors in my bright pink dress, my voice authoritative, in the back of my mind wondering how this would screw everything up.

The pressure was now on me, and I was also the one whose body needed to be at medical appointments multiple times a month. The blood draw, the ultrasound, the hormones, the testing, the insertion. It would all be fine though, I told him, I told myself. We’d be fine. How could I be angry when he was going through so much, too? But I was angry. Perhaps, I had mentioned to him the year before, when he turned to me gently but practically and said we should go straight to IVF, that he might consider himself as part of the equation. We fought. We stalled. We sought a second opinion and started a less invasive route. But the damage was done. Maybe it was him, maybe it was me, maybe it was both of us. But it was still my body that had to bear it all.

The doctor’s office did not prepare me for my first period post-surgery. I bled so profusely I ruined two pairs of shorts. “That’ll happen,” they laughed when I told the nurses at my next appointment. They had seen it all before, they were unfazed. They were busy. They had forgotten how afraid each of their patients was, unsure as to what to expect, unsure as to what was normal or not. A little warning would have been nice, I thought as I sat, as I always did, bottomless and vulnerable. This was all new to me. It was terrifying. Isolating.

My body still hadn’t fully recovered by the next scheduled intrauterine insemination (IUI) and yet they still suggested we move forward. The nurse gently pushed the ultrasound wand inside me, unable to use any lubricant for the procedure. I gestured for my husband to stand from his chair and hold my hand. I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

“I’m trying to go as slow as I can,” the nurse assured me.

“It’s not that,” I breathed deeply. “I’m just having a panic attack.” As I said it out loud, I realized how ridiculous I sounded, how I must have looked. A thirty-three-year-old woman with her legs splayed, ultrasound wand inside her, crying and shaking. It was so easy to blame myself, to feel I was letting everyone down by not conceiving. I had put myself and my body through so much…why was I pushing myself so hard? Was this even what I wanted? Was my body trying to tell me something? I had been on autopilot. A year after we married we bought a house, and as soon as we moved in I stopped birth control. When nothing had happened after a year, we started calling specialists. Everything had happened so fast, we hadn’t stopped to consider the impact of it all. How had I arrived here, panicking on an exam table, the contents of my empty womb mocking me on the screen beside me?

When the office called two weeks later with the news that it hadn’t worked they suggested I take a break. That I would have a better success rate if I was in a better mental state. Of course it hadn’t worked. How under any circumstances could conception-via-panic-attack have been a welcoming environment for an embryo to implant? How bad did I have to be for the doctor’s office – who shuffled in so many countless women, all seemingly with the same outfits and the same hair sitting in silence in that cramped waiting room – to recognize I was the one out of all of them who wasn’t okay? All those other women seemed to be handling everything just fine. And we weren’t even doing IVF yet, not even at the most intense part. An extended family member who had undergone a decade of treatment before conceiving let us know we hadn’t even really started.

But they were right. We would not be successful under these circumstances. There was too much stress coming from all corners of our life, and we needed to take a step back. We started therapy, together and individually for me. We became better at communicating with one another. I learned to give myself breaks when I started feeling anxious or overwhelmed. At my job, I talked to the owners of the company, who let me work from home part of the week. I took a lot of walks. I journaled. I detached. I waited to get better – mentally, physically…just generally better. Or at least someone who resembled the person I used to be.

“We might as well go to Ireland,” my husband suggested. He had the time while in between jobs, we had enough money, and we both needed a break. It was a trip we had been talking about for a while, always putting it off for one reason or another. So we went. Little did we know it would be our last international trip for some time due to COVID. It had been a few months since my panic attack in the procedure room. Maybe I was more relaxed now. Maybe we could get pregnant naturally. How many stories had we heard of people who gave up and became pregnant, finding that all they needed was a vacation, a break from work, a different time of day for everything to magically connect?

Sitting at a pub in Killarney we were so hopeful we even discussed names. We walked the shops, purchasing items for our niece and nephew, and thought about how one day we might be buying something small for ourselves. We hadn’t talked that way in a long time. When struggling to conceive, I found it better to depersonalize, to not grow too invested in the process, otherwise, there’s constant disappointment. But I always felt too much in life. I always put myself out there and I was always heartbroken. It was a comfortable cycle, this wanting and this denial. But now this was a pain people could understand. Everyone wanted a child, right? The people who had kids couldn’t imagine life without them. How horrible it must be for us, I assumed they thought. For once, I felt seen by people who had misunderstood me my entire life. This was a common language, a connection – this wanting, this emptiness.

On the train from Galway to Dublin, I got my period. There was something poetic about it happening in transit, something about the urgency, the fact it was our last day before flying home, as if the universe couldn’t let us enjoy our idealism for very long. Fuck it, I thought, as we checked into our swank hotel. Minibar. Cocktail lounge. I had gone fourteen months without drinking – something I told people was fertility related but really wasn’t. I started again shortly after the surgery when everything was converging. Anyway, I was on vacation. I was relaxing. I deserved it. I had earned it.

I had a healthy buzz by the time we arrived at dinner, where we were seated at a communal table near a young woman with tousled blonde hair and bright red lipstick enjoying a glass of wine and reading a book. We started talking and invited her to the bar at our hotel. After one drink in the lobby lounge, we went to another bar on the roof. She started rubbing my back with her long nails.

“We could totally have a threesome right now if we wanted,” I told my husband when she was in the bathroom. “I’d have to be the one to initiate though.”

“Do you want it to happen?” he asked. Our eyes toyed with the possibility. He knew I had been in a similar situation before that wasn’t consensual. It was a fun story to tell, too, unless you knew the reality.

“I’m on my period, I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I told him, shaking my head. “But we could.” The truth was, I was too depressed. The truth was, I was too drunk. I was slipping back into the patterns that led me to stop drinking in the first place that evening in real time. Shortly after midnight, she left, and we went back to our room where we raided food from the minibar and passed out. I was hungover for the six-hour flight home. Nothing had worked. I wasn’t pregnant. I was regretting the night before. We had gone on the trip that was supposed to fix everything, but everything was still the same.

But so long as you tell the story well, you can rewrite the narrative. The trauma becomes the humorous anecdote. We almost had a threesome. We almost got pregnant. We almost had everything we ever wanted.

Almost.

Amanda ReCupido is an author and book reviewer with work in McSweeney’s, Forbes, and on stages in and around Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @amandarecupido.