Just Let Me Be Their Mom

There is an empty room in our house. We could make it an office. A guest room. A place for all the random things that still haven’t found a home since we moved.

But we won’t.

Because that’s the nursery.

There isn’t a crib in it. There aren’t clothes hanging in the closet or diapers stacked in a drawer. There isn’t a baby.

Not yet.

But that’s still what we call it.

The nursery.

Maybe that sounds silly. Maybe it’s a little painful. But I think, more than anything, it’s our way of leaving room for hope.

Because even after all the negative tests, all the disappointment, all the months of wondering when it will finally be our turn, we haven’t figured out how to stop believing someone belongs in that room.

We just haven’t met them yet.

Before infertility, I thought about all the details.

How I would tell Jacob.

Whether we’d have a boy or a girl.

Names.

Nursery ideas.

Who they’d look like.

All the things you dream about when having a baby still feels like a question of when.

Infertility has changed what I pray for.

The prayer has gotten much simpler.

God, just let me be their mom.

That’s it.

I don’t need the details anymore.

I just want them.

Which is probably why something I’ve been seeing online lately has bothered me so much.

Videos started showing up on my TikTok of women talking about terminating their pregnancies if they found out they were having boys.

I don’t know these women, and I don’t know what is real, what is rage bait, or what exists outside of the few seconds I’m seeing on my phone.

But I know how those words hit me.

If it’s a boy, I don’t want it.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Because while I was watching someone talk about a baby being unwanted because they weren’t the gender she hoped for, there was an empty room down the hall from me that my husband and I refuse to call anything but a nursery.

And I would give anything to know who we’re waiting for.

My infertility doesn’t give me ownership over someone else’s pregnancy. Someone else’s pregnancy isn’t the reason I’m not pregnant.

Their choices don’t change my circumstances.

I’ve written before about learning to hold someone else’s joy alongside my own grief, and I still believe that deeply.

But infertility changes the way you hear things.

It changes the way you see two lines on a pregnancy test.

It changes the way you look at an ultrasound picture.

It changes what you pray for.

There was probably a time when I could have told you exactly what I pictured. Maybe a little girl. Maybe a little boy who looked just like his dad. Maybe one of each someday.

I still let myself imagine those things sometimes.

But somewhere along the way, the details stopped mattering quite as much.

Because I don’t want a girl.

I don’t want a boy.

I want my child.

Whoever they are.

Whatever they look like.

Whatever personality God has already written into them.

I don’t need them to fit the picture I made in my head before I knew them. I just want the chance to know them.

Maybe that’s the part of those videos that has stayed with me. Not just the abortion debate. Not just whether someone wanted a boy or a girl.

But the idea that a child could become less wanted because they weren’t what someone pictured.

Because infertility has been teaching me the exact opposite.

It has been slowly taking the picture out of my hands.

The timeline I wanted.

The announcements I imagined.

The age I thought I’d become a mom.

The way I assumed all of this would happen.

One by one, I’ve had to loosen my grip on all of it.

And I won’t pretend I’ve done that gracefully. There are still days I want to ask God why. There are still months when I let myself hope and then wish I hadn’t.

There are still moments when waiting feels less like some beautiful lesson in patience and more like something I am simply tired of doing.

Sometimes I don’t want another lesson.

I just want the baby.

And I think God can handle me saying that.

That empty room is still there. Sometimes I walk past it and barely think about it. Other times I look through the doorway and see everything that isn’t there yet.

The crib.

The rocking chair.

The tiny clothes.

The baby we would walk across the hall to check on for absolutely no reason other than making sure they’re still breathing.

I can see all of it.

Maybe infertility is supposed to make you protect your heart.

To stop imagining.

To stop planning.

To wait until you have something certain before you make room for it.

But we made room anyway.

Not with furniture.

Not with paint colors.

Just with an empty room that we refuse to give another purpose.

For now, hope looks like an empty bedroom.

I don’t know when that room will become a nursery. I don’t know what our story will look like. I don’t know how many more times I’ll pray the same prayer before I understand the answer.

And I’m learning not to put words in God’s mouth just because I desperately want something from Him.

Faith doesn’t mean I know exactly what He’s going to do.

It means I keep bringing the desire to Him anyway.

So I do.

Again and again.

God, just let me be their mom.

And maybe someday I’ll sit in a dark ultrasound room with my husband’s hand in mine. Maybe we’ll stare at a screen and see the little person we’ve talked about, prayed about, cried about, and saved an entire room for.

Maybe someone will ask us if we want to know.

Boy or girl?

And whatever the answer is, I hope I remember this version of me.

The one who didn’t know yet.

The one who walked past an empty room every day.

The one who would have given anything just to hear someone say,

There’s your baby.

Because I wasn’t praying for pink.

I wasn’t praying for blue.

I was praying for you.

Whoever you are, there is already a place for you here.

There has been for a long time.

We’re waiting for you.

And until then, I’ll keep praying the same simple prayer.

God, just let me be their mom.