living Life in The Waiting Room

I really thought this would be different. I thought this year I would be writing something softer, something quieter, maybe something about tiny hands and sleepless nights and the kind of exhaustion that feels earned, something about holding my baby as I tried to find the words for my first Mother’s Day. Instead, I’m here, and here is a strange place to try to explain, because nothing about it is clean, nothing about it is linear, it’s not even entirely sad in the way people expect it to be. It’s something far more disorienting than that, something that doesn’t sit neatly in one emotion or another, something that shifts depending on the hour, the day, the moment you catch me in.

It feels like I’m living my life in a waiting room, not the kind with an end time, not the kind where someone eventually calls your name and tells you what happens next, but a kind of suspended space between what was supposed to be and whatever comes after this. Right around the time you’re reading this, our baby would have been born, and I still can’t quite write that sentence without it catching somewhere in my chest, without feeling the quiet weight of what should have been unfolding in our lives right now.

After ten years of trying, hoping, recalibrating, grieving in smaller ways along the way, we finally got there, and then we didn’t. And I don’t know that there are words that actually hold that kind of whiplash, because it wasn’t even my body, and that’s the part that still feels almost impossible to explain. I had already grieved the reality that I couldn’t carry my own child, I had already made peace, or something close to peace, with the idea that if this was going to happen for us, it would happen through someone else. So when it finally did, when our surrogate became pregnant, it was this strange, fragile miracle I didn’t quite know how to hold, something that felt both deeply real and slightly out of reach all at once.

Watching someone else carry your child is its own emotional terrain, it asks you to loosen your grip in ways that don’t come naturally, it asks you to trust, to surrender, to believe in something happening just outside of your own body, your own control. And I did, I let myself believe it was real, I let myself step into that future, even if I was arriving at it differently than I had once imagined. And then we lost it, not from within me, but still somehow from everything in me, which is a kind of loss that doesn’t have a clean place to land. It’s a particular kind of grief, losing something your body never held but your heart had already built a home for, a grief that lives in the space between what you physically experienced and what you emotionally allowed yourself to become.

And what makes that loss even harder to hold is knowing how much came before it, because every embryo we have fought for feels like one of our babies, there is nothing abstract about them to me. They carry ten years of my life, ten years of surgeries, of recovery, of hormones, of putting my body through something over and over again in the hope that it would eventually give us a chance. They hold the physical toll, the emotional unraveling, the quiet spiritual negotiations you make when you want something this deeply, and the financial strain that comes with chasing something that never comes easily. So to finally arrive there, to finally see it take shape in the world, even if it wasn’t inside of me, and then to have it taken from us, it doesn’t just feel like loss, it feels like its own kind of cruelty, like something that asked everything of you and then disappeared anyway.

It’s also the loss of the version of myself who thought she had finally crossed into something new, the loss of a timeline that, for a brief moment, felt like it had chosen me back. And if I’m being honest, it’s the loss of the fight, at least for now, because this is the first year in a decade where we are not actively trying, not tracking, not planning, not pushing forward, not asking what’s next with urgency behind it, because there is no fight left in us right now. We know we will go back, we know we’re not done, but there is a difference between being determined and being depleted, and right now we are depleted.

So we’ve landed here, in this in between, and what I’ve learned, or maybe what I’ve been forced to learn, is that two things can be equally true in a way I never understood before. I am, in some quiet and surprising ways, grateful for this pause, grateful to focus on my body without it being a means to an end, grateful to turn toward my husband again without everything being filtered through what we’re trying to build, grateful for space to breathe, even if I didn’t choose the way it came. And at the exact same time, I feel like I am being left behind in my own life, because the world does not pause with you.

My friends’ babies are here, they’re growing, they’re hitting milestones I can name without ever having experienced them, six months, one year, first steps, first words, they’re meeting each other, reaching for each other, becoming part of something I feel just outside of. I watch my friends hold their children, feed them, soothe them, talk about labor stories and sleep schedules and the quiet, repetitive rituals of motherhood, and there is a part of me that doesn’t even know where to put what I feel. It’s not jealousy in the way people assume, it’s recognition and absence at the same time, it’s knowing exactly what something means and not having it.

And then there are the moments no one talks about, the hesitation in someone’s voice when they tell you they’re pregnant again, the messages that go unanswered because maybe it feels easier not to say it out loud to me, the way joy gets softened around me, edited, filtered, as if it might break me if it comes through unprotected. And I understand it, which is what makes it harder, because I would never want to be the reason someone dims their happiness, and yet I can feel them trying to protect me, and it reminds me in the most subtle ways that I am now someone who needs protecting.

There are days where it feels like I’ve failed at something fundamental, something my body was supposed to do, something that seems to come so naturally to everyone around me that it almost feels like I missed a step somewhere, like there was a language I was supposed to learn and somehow didn’t. Seeing my friends breastfeed, hearing them talk about what their bodies endured and accomplished, watching them move through something I wanted so deeply to experience, it’s impossible not to question yourself, to sit with the quiet, unspoken fear that maybe your body has betrayed you, or maybe you’ve betrayed it.

And then there’s Mother’s Day, a day that has never felt simple to me, not even before all of this. I don’t have a relationship with my own mother, I don’t have that place to land, that easy expression of maternal love that so many people return to on a day like this, and now I’m not a mother either. So where does that leave me. I am not receiving it, I am not giving it, I am somewhere outside of it, looking in from both sides, trying to piece together what this day even means from a place that doesn’t neatly fit into any of the categories it was built for.

And maybe that’s the truth I keep circling back to, even if it’s not a comforting one, there isn’t a clean reframe here. There isn’t a moment where everything clicks into place and I can tell you that this made me stronger, or clearer, or more certain of anything. What I do know is that this experience has asked more of me than I knew how to give, it has forced me to sit inside contradictions I can’t resolve, to hold hope and grief in the same hand, to feel gratitude for a life that still feels, in certain ways, incomplete, to keep showing up to days that don’t look anything like the ones I imagined.

And maybe, for now, that is enough, not closure, not resolution, just the quiet, persistent act of staying. Staying in my life even when it doesn’t look the way I thought it would, staying open even when it would be easier to shut down, staying soft in a place that keeps asking me to harden. If you are here too, in your own version of a waiting room, I don’t have answers for you, but I do see you, in the spaces no one knows how to name, in the moments that feel too complicated to explain, in the version of your life that hasn’t arrived yet, and the one you’re still trying to make peace with. There is nothing neat about this, but there is something honest in it, and for now, that’s all I have to offer.