The Art of Waiting Quotes

“The pregnant body suggests a story we think we know: health, love, happiness.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“It is undignified to inject yourself with hormones designed to slow or enhance ovarian production. It is undignified to have your ovaries monitored by transvaginal ultrasound; to be sedated so that your eggs can be aspirated into a needle; to have your husband emerge sheepishly from a locked room with the “sample” that will be combined with your eggs under supervision of an embryologist. The grainy photo they hand you on transfer day, of your eight-celled embryo (which does not look remotely like a baby), is undignified, and so is all the waiting and despairing that follows.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“The life an infertile person seeks comes to her not by accident and not by fate but by hard-fought choices. How to put together the portfolio of photographs. How to answer at the home study. What clinic or doctor or procedure. Donor egg or donor sperm or donor embryo. Open or closed adoption. What country, what boxes to check or uncheck. What questions to ask, and ask again. When to start and when to stop. What to say when her child says, Tell me my story.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“each baby is born not just to her parents, but to the world surrounding her. To neighbors, friends, teachers, enclosure mates. To ex-cons and allomothers and cousins and grandmothers, who will each want a peek and will each have some impact.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“it’s all just different paths to misery.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“79 percent of the clinics featured photographs of babies on their home pages, 30 percent used the word dream on the home page, and 8.87 percent used the word miracle.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“For a pregnant woman, nine months can seem endlessly long, but in infertility treatment, it goes by in a flash—Nine more months, you think: I should be pregnant by now. I thought I’d have a baby.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“Of course she’ll know how dearly she was wanted by her parents, how long awaited, how precious. But I hope she’ll also know how many other people—the doctors, nurses, embryologists, and general well-wishers—were there too, rooting for her, for us.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“walked until I found good-luck clovers, prayed though I don’t believe in God.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“Infertility was our problem together, but it was my body being treated, my body that had to attend every appointment and accept the shots.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“there is evidence that infertility, as a stressor, is equivalent to the experience of living with cancer, HIV, or other chronic illnesses.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“When prolonged, either by infertility or other circumstances, baby fever can cause the opposite effect—instead of feeling drawn to babies and young children and the baby aisles of stores, sufferers begin avoiding places where they’ll encounter reminders of what they cannot have. They grow alienated from pregnant friends or friends with children, sometimes ending relationships that become too painful.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“So we talk about that for a while: deleting Facebook friends whose frequent status updates document their gestational cycle, steering clear of baby showers and children’s birthday parties. We talk about our fears that we will be left out, left behind, while our friends and relatives go about the business of raising their ever-growing families.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“The breeding of captive lowland gorillas is managed by a Species Survival Plan that aims to ensure genetic diversity among captive members of a species. That means adult female gorillas are given birth control pills—the same kind humans take—until genetic testing recommends them for breeding with a male of the same species.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood

“sound at once faraway and up close, makes me feel as though I am living inside a seashell.”
― Belle Boggs, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood