Someone you love is going through in vitro fertilization (IVF), and you want to be supportive. You have the best intentions, but sometimes your loved one seems cold and distant when you are only trying to help. Or, you are so fearful of saying the wrong thing that you haven’t said anything at all—and you’re worried they don’t know how much you care. On my own journey through infertility and IVF, these were seven things people said with good intentions that unintentionally made me feel more alone.

The first time I ever got pregnant after years of trying, I found out from a nurse who barely looked up from her clipboard. After years of trying to conceive, an infertility diagnosis, and our first IVF embryo transfer, I was sitting in an exam room waiting for a progesterone injection. Before administering the shot, the nurse asked me to take a pregnancy test. A few minutes later, she casually informed me that it was positive, and I walked out of the clinic in shock. I was finally pregnant…but a week later, I wasn’t.

I walked into my 37-week prenatal appointment expecting to be back home in time for my afternoon of work meetings. Less than 24 hours later, I was holding my newborn son in my arms. Like many first-time moms, I had spent months imagining how labor might begin. Maybe my water would break dramatically in the middle of the night; maybe my husband would time my contractions from the comfort of home before heading to the hospital with carefully packed bags and nervous excitement. I never anticipated that a routine doctor’s appointment would suddenly become our son’s birthday.

By the time we actually started IVF, I understood the medical process fairly well…but there was so much more to it that I never anticipated. Nobody told me how much waiting was involved, or that I’d become emotionally attached to microscopic embryos, or how much IVF would affect my husband, or how it would completely change the way I viewed hope, grief, and motherhood. These are the lessons I still think about most, not because they were the hardest, but because they were the ones I never heard anyone else talk about.

I pictured motherhood starting with a positive pregnancy test, a growing belly, and eventually bringing our baby home from the hospital. Instead, my journey began with negative pregnancy tests month after month, fertility appointments, countless painful injections, grief, and learning how little control we actually have over the things we want most. IVF didn’t just change how I became a mother; it changed how I think about motherhood itself.