The Waiting and The Hope

I know the exact day of my cycle the way some people know their PIN numbers. Automatically. Without thinking. It lives in my body and in my phone and in a notes app that has become the most private document I own.

I have been trying for four years.

I want to write that sentence without softening it because I spent a long time softening it, saying things like we are not not trying or it will happen when it happens, and what that softening really was, was protection. Protection from the conversations that follow when you say the real thing out loud.

Four years.

In Nigeria, the conversation would have started much earlier. My mother would have known by month four. The aunties would have been circling by month six. By month eight there would have been a pastor involved, a prayer group, a recommended yam and herb combination from a woman in my grandmother's village who has helped several people. I say this not to mock it. I say it because there is a comfort in being surrounded by people who are invested in your outcome, who will not leave you alone with the waiting, who bring the weight of collective hope into the room with them even when it is heavy.

Here I carry it mostly by myself.

My husband knows. He has been patient and present in all the ways I could ask him to be. But there is a specific loneliness to this that I cannot fully share even with him, because it lives in my body in a way it does not live in his. Every month has a rhythm now. The hoping, the watching, the waiting, the knowing, the grief that is not quite grief because nothing was ever confirmed, just the absence of what you were hoping for. Then the reset. Then the hoping again.

I have done the tests. I have sat in waiting rooms at fertility clinics with a number and a clipboard. I have had conversations with doctors who are kind and clinical and who speak in percentages and timelines. I have learned words I did not know before. Follicle stimulating hormone. Luteal phase. Endometrial lining. I have become a student of something I never wanted to study.

The drugs have side effects that my doctor listed quickly and I nodded at quickly and then went home and felt one by one over the following weeks. The mood swings that arrive without warning. The bloating. The headaches. The way your body becomes a project you are managing rather than a home you are living in.

I called my mother once when it was particularly bad. I did not tell her everything. I told her I was tired. She said: are you eating enough? I said yes. She said: you are working too hard. I said maybe. She said: just relax and it will happen. She meant well. I know she meant well. But relax is not a fertility treatment and I have stopped being able to hear that sentence without something tightening in my chest.

The thing about being here is that I am navigating a medical system I am still learning with a cultural background that did not prepare me for clinical fertility treatment. Back home the conversation about children is loud and constant and communal. Here the conversation is private and medical and mine alone to manage. Neither approach is complete. What I actually need is somewhere between both and I am trying to find it in a country that is still learning my name.

I have found a community online. Nigerian women in diaspora who are also TTC, who speak both languages, the medical and the cultural, who understand what it means to be pressing forward in a fertility clinic on a Tuesday and answering your mother's questions about grandchildren on a Sunday and holding both things at the same time. These women have kept me sane in ways I cannot fully explain. Some of them are on the other side now, with children they fought hard to have. Some of them are still here with me, in the waiting.

I still have hope. I want to say that clearly because this kind of story can read as defeat and it is not defeat. It is an endurance I did not know I had until I needed it.

Some months are harder than others. Some months I am fine until I am not, until I see a pregnancy announcement on my phone and have to put it down and sit somewhere quiet for a few minutes and feel what I feel and then come back. I have learned to do this without hating the people who are announcing. Their joy is not my subtraction. I know this. I remind myself of it.

My body is still mine. I still trust it, on most days. I still believe it knows something I do not know yet about timing, about when things are ready, about what is coming.

I am still waiting.

But I am not waiting quietly anymore. I am talking about it. Writing about it. Letting it be a real thing that is happening to a real woman in a real life, not a private failure to be managed in silence.

If you are in this with me, I see you.

The waiting is real. So is the hope.

I am still in it. Most days that is enough to keep going.