Laetitia Felix On Living Between Hope and Fear: The Emotional Reality of Infertility and Waiting

I’ve Lived in Hope and Fear: Here’s What Waiting Really Does to Us

Waiting.

Sitting in rooms full of hope and empty of answers.

Staring at negative tests, at doctors’ faces that can’t reassure us and instead plant more fear within us, at calendars that refuse to move fast enough.

Attending friends’ baby showers while forcing a smile.

Being asked the one question you dread: “When are you starting a family?” Over and over.

Watching your friends get pregnant.

Seeing the announcements flood your feed.

And yes, sometimes, it’s even women who don’t seem to care for themselves, yet life gives them exactly what you’ve been longing for.

Meanwhile, we are tracking cycles, drinking teas, doing acupuncture, cutting caffeine, sugar… joy! Meditating, healing childhood wounds, trying to relax because everyone says that will help.

We experience loss not only in cycles or pregnancies, but in the way our dreams shift. The beautiful, naive picture we once painted of conceiving a family—filled with joy, spontaneity, and ease—slowly becomes a medicalised world of appointments, tests, and procedures. If we’re not careful, we can lose ourselves along the way, forgetting to live while trying to create life. We grieve the time spent waiting, the years devoted to hope and healing, the moments of our lives that slip past as we focus all our energy on what hasn’t yet arrived. With each passing day, that grief leaves its mark, reshaping our hearts and the image of who we thought we would be.

And yet, somehow, we show up again and again. Despite the fear, despite the heartbreak, we rise each month, each day, each moment—carrying hope in one hand and grief in the other. We work, we love, we smile, we try again.

Every month brings a new blend of fear and hope. We celebrate small victories quietly—the temperature spike, the timing, the what if—while bracing ourselves for the weight of disappointment if it doesn’t stick. Friends, family, strangers—well-meaning and curious—ask questions we cannot answer without tearing open our hearts.

Do not mistake this waiting for weakness. Do not believe that silent endurance is quiet or easy. It is not. It takes courage to live in the tension of hope and fear. It takes strength to cradle grief and still believe in possibility. It takes ferocity to dream a future that keeps slipping through your fingers, month after month, year after year.

And slowly, quietly, something profound happens. The waiting teaches us what no test or outcome ever could: patience, self-compassion, and an unshakable inner strength. Our bodies may have been tested, our hearts bruised, but we are learning to rise again. To honour the grief, the longing, the desire. To hold hope in one hand and fear in the other, without letting either control us.

This is the invisible power of women who wait. The world rarely notices it because it is not loud. But it is fierce. It is relentless. It is sacred. And it is ours.

So, to every woman who sits in silence, who grieves privately, who continues to hope in the shadows: your strength is seen. Your courage is real. Know that your story will inspire others to carry their hope as bravely as you have carried yours.

Waiting is not weakness. Waiting is the quiet, ferocious force that shapes us, moulds us, and teaches us what it truly means to fight, to love, and to live.