What Waiting Taught Me

I wrote this in a season where motherhood felt distant and uncertain.

I’m sharing it now from the other side of waiting, for anyone still holding hope gently.

I learned how to wait

before I ever learned how to mother.

Not the tidy kind of waiting,

but the kind that stretches time thin,

that makes every month feel both heavy and hollow.

I learned the language of maybe.

The careful way hope learns to whisper

when it’s been bruised too many times.

I prayed without timelines.

I held faith with open hands,

afraid that clenching it too tightly

might break it.

There were rooms filled with quiet decisions,

numbers that carried more weight than they should,

and a grief that didn’t look like grief

because nothing had been lost,

only delayed.

Waiting taught me how to surrender

without giving up.

How to keep loving a future

I couldn’t yet hold.

And then one day,

the waiting did not disappear,

it softened.

It turned into a room filled with tiny clothes,

a chair that rocks even when no one is sitting in it,

a heart that remembers what it once asked for

every time it answers a cry in the night.

Motherhood did not erase the waiting.

It sanctified it.

I mother now with reverence,

because I know what it cost to arrive here.

Because I know how fragile hope can feel

when it is asked to endure.

This is not a story of getting everything I wanted.

It is a story of learning to trust

that God was present

even when the answer took time.

And sometimes,

I still sit quietly

and thank Him

for teaching me how to wait

before He taught me how to hold.

A poem to myself about my IVF journey into motherhood.

🤍 Chelsea

The Human Algorithm for Moms