In the latest issue of Brevity, writer Michaella Thornton explains how she answers strangers about “My One, My Only.” At the grocery store with her toddler daughter, someone will invariably ask, “Is she your only child?” Thornton understands there are things that “give us away,” like “the way I narrate our grocery trip.”

When “someone asks the ‘only child’ question” at checkout, Thornton recalls the years of infertility treatments she endured: “Instead of conceiving a baby by a glacier-fed lake, we pray at the altar of reproductive medicine and lost causes.” Thornton wonders at it all, noting that the “human egg is a redwood among the rest of our sapling-sized cells. Think of the size of a period at the end of this sentence—that is the size of a human egg.”

She relays the grueling aspects of her experience with infertility treatments, the “pin-pricked stomach,” the “loneliness together” she endures with her husband. In the end, though, “as the doctors put my organs back into my body, as I throw up into a kidney-shaped pan” she is “crying over and over again to my newborn daughter, ‘I love you. I love you so much.'”

In this flash essay Thornton uses a moment with a stranger, an intrusive question many feel compelled to ask, to convey her experience with infertility, with IVF treatments, with the miracle that is her one and only child. She notes the “inadequacy of the question” strangers pose, and, in this short piece, takes us with her through “sublime sadness and joy.”

Writing Prompt: Have you had a stranger comment on the number of children you do, or don’t, have? How did you feel, what thoughts did it trigger when you received this question? Have you or someone you know struggled with infertility or are you a physician who treats this? What is it like for a patient to go through this treatment? Write for 10 minutes.