We don’t have good language for the state of wanting to have kids but not yet having them, even though 12 to 13 percent of couples have trouble becoming, or staying, pregnant, per the Department of Health & Human Services.

Romper wanted to cover that experience, rarely explored in depth by parenting sites, so we recruited five people for what we called the Trying Project. The "Try-ers" were five women, all trying to conceive, all with different backgrounds and different complicating factors. We imagined we could lift the lid on infertility by focusing on the shared, lived experience, rather than the baby tally. But it was far more complicated than that. We think about trying to conceive as a physical challenge, but it is equally an emotional undertaking, as we see from the Try-ers' stories, twelve months on.