The Hardest Thing We’ve Ever Done
Is the Best Thing We’ve Ever Built
Here is a photo of me that recently surfaced when my family was digitizing old pictures for my grandmother. I'm maybe four or five years old, two water bottles clutched to my chest and a cowtail tucked in like I'd negotiated it into the lineup somehow. The look on my face isn't a big grin. It's quieter than that. It's the look of a kid who has absolutely no doubt about herself.
My parents could tell you more about that little girl than I can. They dressed me in jeans that were always a little too tight and white tank tops, my belly hanging over the waistband, completely unbothered. On weekends I'd climb into my dad's truck and go to work with him (he runs a landscaping business) and he'd hand me jobs that no other kid my age was doing. Sealing invoices, bank deposit slips, finding the right tool in the toolbox and handing it over without being asked twice. He treated me like I was capable before I even knew what capable meant, and I absorbed every bit of it.
I climbed trees. I did the monkey bars. I went off the high dive. I didn't care about getting dirty. My parents will tell you I was fearless.
I grew up believing, completely and without question, that hard work was the answer to everything. That if you wanted something badly enough and put in the effort, you would get it. My dad showed me that, Saturday after Saturday, from the passenger seat of his truck.
I had never been given a real reason to believe otherwise.
Until IVF.
Meeting Charlie
When I met Charlie, I was introduced to Cystic Fibrosis pretty quickly. It wasn't something people brought up in front of him, but everyone who knew him knew. Mornings and evenings meant an hour of treatments: a vest, a nebulizer with antibiotics, and enzymes with every meal. Cystic Fibrosis was always present.
About six months into our relationship, the next version of Trikafta came out. I watched it change Charlie's life in real time. He coughed less and he just felt better. The grueling treatment schedule that had defined his days started to lift. I had never heard of Cystic Fibrosis before I met him, and now I was watching a drug give Charlie a different kind of future.
As time went on, I learned more about what Cystic Fibrosis really means: the life expectancy, the progression, the weight of it. It was scary and honestly it still is.
We talked about having kids before we got married. We knew that would include IVF because of Charlie's Cystic Fibrosis. We talked about it the way we talked about most things: practically, as a plan we would execute when the time was right. When I got my job at Google and learned of the additional fertility benefits, we were genuinely so excited.
I wasn't scared. I had never known anyone who had been through IVF personally, but it had been around for decades. People did it all the time. Our first fertility doctor told us early on that there was no reason to believe it wouldn't work for us. I remember feeling like this was just another thing to prepare for, another process to learn, another checklist to work through. I'd do the research, figure out the steps, and put in the effort. That was how I did everything.
What I Didn't Know
We started our first official IVF cycle in September 2025. By then we'd already been on this road for a year, but that fall was when it really began. What followed became the hardest year of my life.
I won't give you every clinical detail here. That's another blog, for another day, with all the numbers and timelines and things I wish someone had told me before we started. But I want to tell you what it felt like because that's the part I wasn't prepared for.
I stopped feeling like myself. For more than a year.
The injections you get used to, in parking lots, in hotels, on airplanes. You just figure it out. You become someone who carries medication, needles, and alcohol swabs everywhere. But the hormones don't stop just because you've mastered the logistics. They move through you. The headaches, the exhaustion, the anxiety, the bloating, the weight gain, the moods that don't feel like yours. You don't know what your baseline is anymore. You're told not to exercise the way you're used to, so you walk instead, but then it was winter, and even getting outside felt dark, and some days everything just felt miserable.
We went through cycle after cycle. Fresh transfers. Frozen transfers. Each one carrying everything, and each one coming back negative. After our third failed embryo transfer, I just cried until I couldn't cry anymore.
In between all of it, I kept trying to find the thing I could control. I followed a Mediterranean diet. I tried acupuncture. I drank pomegranate juice. I ate tree nuts. I wore warm socks. I got McDonald's french fries after transfer because someone on the internet said so. I did everything I had ever read or been told might help.
It didn't matter. We still didn't get pregnant.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Gemini became my closest friend when Charlie was asleep. One in the morning. Three. Five, when I'd finally give up on sleep and start the day. I asked her everything. Interpret these results. What does this follicle count mean? What are my chances this cycle? Why isn't this working? Do I have endometriosis? Why is everyone else getting pregnant and not me? She never had the answer I was actually looking for, but she was always awake, and that counted for something.
For the first time in my entire life, I was working as hard as I possibly could, and hard work wasn't the answer. That fearless girl on the front steps had built her whole life around the idea that effort produces outcomes. But here was something that just didn't work that way. No matter what I did. No matter how good I was.
Why me? Why isn't it working? What do we do now? I asked those questions a lot. No one had great answers.
A Rainy Weekend in April
After our third failed retrieval, I was in a really dark place. I felt like a complete failure. I worried about whether I would ever become a mom, whether I would ever feel like myself again, whether the confident girl was just gone.
Then, slowly, my mood started to stabilize. I'd been off the medications for a little while, and for the first time in months I could think a bit more clearly. One day I asked Charlie a question. What if we started a grant to help other Cystic Fibrosis couples going through this? We kept seeing how expensive it was, cycle after cycle, and we knew other families were facing the same impossible math.
Charlie countered with something bigger. What if we started our own foundation?
The following weekend, it rained. We sat together and we built something. We talked about the name. We played with design ideas and built a website with Claude. We filed for our EIN. We started learning what it actually takes to create a nonprofit from scratch. I was excited in a way I hadn't felt in months, checking things off a list together, building something that felt bigger than us, channeling all of that pain into something with a purpose.
By the end of that weekend, we just knew. We were going to take the hardest thing we'd ever been through and turn it into something that helps other Cystic Fibrosis couples. It was all going to be worth it.
Why the Fox Family Foundation Exists
The Fox Family Foundation exists to help families affected by Cystic Fibrosis access IVF. We award grants paid directly to fertility clinics, removing one of the biggest barriers standing between Cystic Fibrosis families and the family they're trying to build.
We built this because so many Cystic Fibrosis couples are now living what we're living. Patients like Charlie are getting healthier. They're living longer, fuller lives, and they're starting to imagine families of their own, something that wasn't really possible until recently. It's a remarkable thing. Building a family through IVF is expensive, and exhausting, and lonely in a way that's hard to describe unless you've sat in that waiting room yourself. We know what it costs, financially, physically, and emotionally. We wanted to make it even a little bit easier for the families coming after us.
I want to be clear: we are still in the middle of our own journey. I don't have a happy ending to give you. What I have is this foundation, the hope it's given me, and the certainty that the families we help deserve to know someone is in their corner.
For a long time, I couldn't have told you what this foundation was giving me. It wasn't exactly purpose. It took me a while to find the words. I think what it gave back was a piece of myself I thought I'd lost. For a year, I had worked as hard as I possibly could and watched it produce nothing. But then here was this thing I could build, that I could pour myself into, that actually took shape because of the effort I put in. It reminded me that I'm still capable. That I can still do anything I want to do. After so long feeling powerless, building this gave me back a quiet kind of confidence, and a real sense of pride. Something that is mine, that exists because Charlie and I decided it should.
There's one more thing I need to tell you, and it's the hardest part to write. I almost didn't share any of this. I'm an introvert. I keep a small circle. I deal with the hard things privately, with the few people I trust most, and I have never been someone who announces to the world when things aren't going my way. The thought of publishing this, of letting people I barely know into the hardest year of my life, scares me. I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me. But this whole experience (the IVF and the foundation both) keeps pushing me to open up in ways I never would have chosen on my own. I've decided that if telling our story helps even one other couple feel a little less alone, then it's worth being scared. It's worth being uncomfortable.
I'm still learning to let go of control. I'm still figuring out who I am when hard work doesn't guarantee the outcome. I'm still on this journey. But I'm no longer just surviving it. I'm building something with it.
