A Different Kind of Grief

I recently told my husband, “I think there’s grief either way.”

After several years of navigating infertility, we have found ourselves in a place of pause. Not because we’ve given up, and not because we don’t still hope—but because continuing treatment no longer feels like the right next step for us. It’s a hard decision to explain, not because it’s dramatic, but because it feels incredibly layered. There’s nothing definitive about it, and yet it holds a kind of finality.

There is undoubtedly grief in imagining a version of life that may never be. Grief in letting go of something we always assumed would come. But what I’ve been working hard to understand and internalize is that the presence of grief doesn’t necessarily mean something has gone wrong.

And honestly, I don’t think that kind of grief is unique to infertility.

And I know that even if we were to have children, there would be grief there too.

The grief of children growing up faster than you were ready for.
The grief of not being able to shield them from pain.
The grief of watching them struggle with things you can’t fix.
The grief of realizing that the dream you had for them isn’t always the path they’ll take.

In my role as head of school, I see this grief all the time—not just in myself, but in the parents we partner with. We grieve when something isn’t working, when a plan changes, when a season of life ends. We grieve what we hoped would be easier. We grieve the limits of our control.

And there’s grief within school leadership, too. It’s not always loud, but it’s definitely there.

The grief of a team that didn’t quite gel.
The grief of a decision that didn’t land the way you hoped.
The grief of a teacher you trusted choosing to leave.
The grief of doing everything you could—and still watching something fall short.
The grief of growing into leadership and realizing what it quietly asks of you, again and again.

Whether you’re a parent or not, whether you lead a school or a classroom or simply show up each day for students—you’re likely carrying some version of this. We all are.

We don’t always call it grief.
We call it change.
We call it transition.
We call it the hard parts of meaningful work.

But underneath, it’s there.

Not everything is a failure.
Not everything needs fixing.

And maybe that’s what I’m trying to learn most right now—that grief doesn’t always mean something is broken. Sometimes it means something mattered—deeply. And naming that doesn’t diminish the work. It grounds it. 

Like I said, I think there’s grief either way. And maybe that’s not something to fix, but something that’s worth holding.