In two days, it will be exactly five years since I sat in a doctor’s office, and heard (straightforwardly and unequivocally) that my body was incapable of carrying children.

It was devastating.

I’d unswervingly wished to be a mother for as long as I could remember. I’d been caring for children practically since I was one. It was a given, really, that I’d have some of my own.

Until it wasn’t. And though yes, I could adopt, I was still gut-punched by the news.

I didn’t want to tell my parents, because I knew they’d seen the same path for me that I had. I didn’t want to tell my friends, because I was horrified by the thought they might feel awkward sharing the news of their families with me, lest they cause me further heartbreak. Even if that would be exactly the case, at times. And I sure didn’t want to tell whatever man I’d end up with, because who knew if that was a dealbreaker?

Five years is both a blink and an eternity, depending on what happens in that time.

In the last five years, I’ve moved five times, changed jobs three times, and fallen in love once.

That last experience has changed my life more so than any other single thing that came before it, including that moment in the doctor’s office.

And in so many ways, it has healed that moment for me, since I now have a soon-to-be-stepson who explodes into my home each week with crazy stories and gangly near-teenage limbs and a goofy laugh reminiscent of his father’s. When he’s there, the whole place changes. And it’s fantastic.

Don’t get me wrong — his mother is very much his mother, to be sure. He looks like her, he adores her, and he is confident in her love every day of his life. We made sure he bought her flowers yesterday because she deserves them; we see evidence of her nurturing in his happy, sweet, confident spirit. She has done the role proud.

So where do I come in?

Well, that’s something we’ll figure out over time, but I have it on good authority that I’m welcome in his family. I laugh at his jokes, I listen when he talks, I cook things he likes, and I make his dad happy — and if there’s anything else he needs as he grows older, I’ll do my best to make it happen. He doesn’t stand a chance of escaping unloved.

It’s not a Hallmark thing. It’s just what is, and what should be.

That said, some part of me still wonders what life would have been like if my body was different, and I’d followed the same path as so many of my friends: a world of pregnancies and elastic waistbands and sonograms and newborns and toddlers and hand-me-downs and entire houses full of people who look and act similar in both striking and subtle ways.

I do get faint twinges of jealousy now and then, as when I see that hundreds of my Facebook friends have a picture of some small person as their profile photo, or when another birth announcement arrives in my inbox, or when someone posts another 85 photos of their growing belly or of tiny toes or of a gap-toothed brood in matching shirts.

I wonder what that would be like to be there from the very beginning, to earn a lifetime membership in a club of overtired, harried, yet content people, forever bonded by this thing they’ve done… even if they started on that path because of a happy accident.

I mean, I know parenting is hard — I don’t need to be one to know that. It LOOKS hard. But the vast majority of people I know don’t wish they’d done anything else.

But in the moments I find myself getting a bit glassy-eyed or overly sentimental or self-pitying about it all, I have to remember that what I’m envying is not so much the result of functioning biology or the euphoria of certain events or some sort of greeting-card magic, but rather the evidence of good choices… or a long series of good choices.

I’m envying the after-effects of something done well. Something that took hard work, dedication, and commitment. Something not easy, but worthwhile. The result… not the whole story.

But sometimes the effort is different, so the result is markedly different.

While our culture is obsessed with the wonder and mystery of fertility and pregnancy, there are millions of people for whom it couldn’t be less amazing.

These people have children they didn’t intend to have, or don’t want anymore, or can’t take care of, or don’t have the resources or wherewithal or emotional or psychological capacity to support anyone else… let alone themselves. These people bring children into the world who they eventually abandon, because they cannot — or will not — make the choice to cherish them. Sometimes out of desperation, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of an evil I don’t intend to understand.

And then there are the children who aren’t abandoned, but who spend their young lives in pain because they have a parent determined to punish them for just being there… a choice they didn’t make, but one they’ll pay for until they’re old enough to walk away.

And then some.

Some of those kids find a second or a third or a fourth set of people who do right by them, and end up in some of those glowing Facebook photos.

But many don’t.

I don’t envy anyone in those families, parent or child — except, perhaps, for the rescuers I just mentioned, who step in when no one else will. And I don’t know if I’d say I envy them so much as that I’m in awe of them, because while I can say now that I believe I could love any child placed in my path, I haven’t had that conviction challenged — and challenged repeatedly.

Determinedly.

Fiercely.

But, funny thing, my in-laws have. They chose to love in a decidedly un-Hallmark situation.

I live with the happy evidence of their good choices every single day, in the person of my future husband. So does my future stepson. We have walking, talking evidence that they made the right call.

And he chose something different for his life, too, something not defined by the difficult experiences he had growing up, but by the second chance he was given — which is why his son is so happy.

So what’s the point of all this?

My envy gives way to thankfulness more and more each year. My understanding of what love is grows more and more each year. My desire to be like everyone else, and look like everyone else, and have a life that everyone else can understand wanes as I grow old enough to understand that life just isn’t that simple — for them, or for me.

I’m not going to need to buy maternity clothes. But I am going to have to make the choice to love a million times over, even when it’s not fun or convenient.

That’s the thing I really always wanted. That’s the thing I was really born to do. And I’m finally far enough down the road to see it.

My experience as a mother will be too long and complicated a story for any Hallmark card. Already is.

But I’ll gladly take the rest of the year, even if I don’t quite fit in to the first Sunday in May.