Some waiting rooms are sterile. Some are soft. A few play Enya or acoustic covers of pop songs, as if the right soundtrack can soothe the fact that you’re waiting for news that might rearrange your life.
In the world of fertility, the waiting room is more than a physical space. It becomes a season. A fog. A quiet stretch of days where nothing changes on the outside, but everything shifts inside.
You might be waiting for your period to come. Or not come.
Waiting to start a cycle.
Waiting to know if this one worked.
Waiting to try again.
Waiting to grieve.
Waiting to hope.
You wait even when you pretend not to be waiting.
“No one teaches you how to live inside a maybe.”
Fertility conversations often fixate on outcomes: Did you get pregnant? How long did it take? What worked? What failed?
But few talk about the in-between. The space after the test but before the call. The two-week wait. The three-day lag between a scan and a verdict. The indefinite pause between one loss and the strength to try again.
That in-between is where so many women live. And they live there silently, because what is there to say?
“I don’t know yet”?
“I’m just… waiting”?
We don’t celebrate waiting. We don’t mark it. But waiting has a pulse, a pattern, a vocabulary of its own.
There’s a specific kind of loneliness that settles in when you’re surrounded by timelines that aren’t your own.
Friends announcing pregnancies.
Algorithms showing you baby gear ads.
Even your own body betraying you by being unclear, irregular, late—but not in the right way.
According to a 2022 report from the National Institutes of Health, about 1 in 5 married women aged 15 to 49 with no prior births are unable to get pregnant after one year of trying. That’s the clinical definition of infertility—but emotional impact shows up far sooner than a diagnosis.
And even outside of that definition, waiting can feel like failure. Like the clock is ticking and everyone else has already crossed the finish line, even though you’re not sure what race you’re in.
In this limbo, time becomes something else entirely.
It stretches. Folds. Disappears.
You develop rituals around distraction—shows you rewatch, meals you always cook when the results are pending.
You get superstitious. You get skeptical.
You get good at smiling through conversations you’re no longer sure you believe in.
And if you’re lucky, you find someone else who is waiting too—not with answers, just with presence. That kind of companionship isn’t flashy. It’s not a “journey” or a wellness plan. It’s just sitting beside someone in the quiet, both of you refreshing your email and pretending you’re not.
In a 2020 study published in Human Reproduction, researchers found that women undergoing fertility treatment reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during periods of waiting than during active treatment phases.
Waiting—not action—was the most emotionally distressing part.
If you’re in that space now, you don’t need a pep talk.
You don’t need a silver lining.
You just need permission to acknowledge that waiting is something.
It is an experience. A weight. A reality.
You are not invisible just because you don’t have an update.
You are doing something—holding hope, managing expectations, waking up each day and still choosing to stay in your body, even when it feels like it’s working against you.
You don’t owe the world a story. You don’t owe yourself a perfect mindset.
You can just be here.
In the middle.
In the maybe.
If you’re waiting, here are a few resources to help hold the quiet with you:
- The Broken Brown Egg: A deeply personal and community-driven platform amplifying the voices of Black women and couples navigating infertility, loss, and reproductive health—with honesty, humor, and heart.
- Waiting for Baby Bird: A blog and Instagram account by a woman openly sharing the long arc of her fertility wait—no tidy endings, just companionship.
- Resolve.org: The National Infertility Association offers support groups, resources, and education for all stages of family building—including when you’re just not there yet.
