The Art of Waiting

What does it mean to wait for a life that may never arrive? In The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood, Belle Boggs transforms the personal pain of infertility into an exploration of science, culture, and empathy. She asks questions that resonate deeply with anyone who has ever waited—whether for a child, a change, or an understanding of what their life might become. Boggs contends that waiting in the context of fertility is both profoundly human and culturally revealing. Through memoir, reportage, and reflection, she examines how longing for children intersects with biology, medicine, religion, art, and economics. The book becomes not only about conception but about how people conceive meaning, identity, and connection.

Waiting as Universal and Personal

Boggs begins her journey amid the natural symphony of cicadas, nesting eagles, and blooming life around her North Carolina home. These cycles contrast hauntingly with her own stalled reproductive rhythm. The natural world amplifies her loneliness: animals reproduce instinctively, while humans deliberate and despair. Through this juxtaposition, she invites readers to see that waiting for fertility mirrors other forms of human waiting—the artist waiting for inspiration, the patient waiting for healing, the writer waiting for words. Waiting is not passive; it is an act of endurance and imagination.

Infertility as a Lens on Modern Life

Boggs’s argument expands beyond her own experience into the ethical, medical, and social fabric surrounding infertility. She explores the science of assisted reproduction—research on monkeys, marmosets, and in-vitro fertilization laboratories—linking human fertility treatments to the reproductive technologies used to preserve endangered species. This parallel asks you to reconsider what the word “natural” even means. By connecting animal reproduction to human longing, Boggs redefines fertility as a shared biological drive, complicated by cultural ideals of motherhood, health, and success.

The author doesn’t romanticize the process: waiting rooms filled with anxious women, journals titled Fertility and Sterility, and stolen scientific magazines depict a world where desire meets data. Yet she finds art in these sterile spaces. Through the abbreviation ART—Assisted Reproductive Technology—Boggs reclaims the humanity behind laboratory language. She writes that such treatments, though clinical, resemble art-making: both involve creation, patience, expense, and hope.

The Intersection of Feminism and Fertility

Infertility, in Boggs’s view, exposes contradictions in modern femininity. Women are taught to delay childbearing for autonomy and ambition, yet society still judges them through their capacity to reproduce. Through literary reflections—from Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen to Adrienne Rich—Boggs situates her experience in feminist history. Woolf’s anguish over childlessness becomes a mirror; Rich’s critique of motherhood as both institution and experience becomes a framework for Boggs’s emotional labor. She shows that infertility is not simply a medical condition but a cultural story loaded with expectations of womanhood, success, and self-worth.

Beyond Biology: Choosing, Adopting, and Creating Families

As the narrative develops, Boggs explores the landscape of choice—whether through ART, adoption, or acceptance of child-free life. She tells the stories of people like Parul and Nate, who adopted after years of loss, and others who learned to redefine family in unexpected ways. These voices broaden the book’s scope from memoir to cultural anthropology, showing how diverse forms of parenthood—gay couples, single mothers, and childless artists—challenge traditional narratives. Boggs ultimately argues that waiting, however painful, can yield insight and transformation. Even those who never become parents discover new purposes and communities through the patience and reflection waiting demands.

Why This Matters

By chronicling her own IVF treatments, medical frustrations, and emotional evolutions, Boggs invites you to see fertility as both a private crisis and a public conversation. Her story reveals the loopholes and inequalities within the U.S. medical system—where insurance often excludes infertility as a legitimate condition—and questions the commodification of reproduction. Yet she refuses cynicism. Instead, she portrays waiting as a spiritual art form, something that teaches resilience and redefines success. At its heart, The Art of Waiting is about transformation: how longing reshapes identity, how science and empathy intertwine, and how the persistence to wait—for fertility, creativity, or meaning—becomes a profoundly creative act itself.

Boggs introduces the concept of baby fever—a near-universal emotional state of longing for a child. Drawing on Finnish sociologist Anna Rotkirch’s research, she explores how this phenomenon manifests physically and psychologically, often beyond rational control. For many women, baby fever feels biological, like an illness that demands fulfillment. You might recognize this as the sudden pull toward infants, family rituals, or the thought of your own lineage. Boggs underscores that this “fever” arises from both evolution and culture: we carry the inherited instinct to nurture, but modern life amplifies the desire by surrounding us with images of family and belonging.

The Evolutionary Drive to Reproduce

Humans, unlike most animals, complicate reproduction with choice. Boggs contrasts species that breed instinctively—like marmosets who suppress ovulation and cooperate in shared parenting—with humans who delay, plan, and agonize. She reminds readers that animals wait without impatience, while we count months and years. This difference highlights a central irony: intelligence grants freedom but also anxiety. In evolutionary psychology terms, baby fever acts as nature’s nudge, an emotional mechanism to ensure continuation of the species even when logic interferes.

Cultural Triggers of Desire

Culturally, Boggs shows that longing grows in environments of abundance and choice—societies where motherhood is optional. In such places, the personal decision to have children collides with feminist ideas of independence. She recalls her mother’s 1970s yearning for kids when peers rejected domestic life for freedom and free love. This contrast reveals how pronatalism—the social pressure to reproduce—continually reshapes our emotions. Whether in media portrayals or polite conversations, fertility becomes moral terrain: to desire children is natural; to decline motherhood is suspect.

Longing and Loss

For Boggs and others facing infertility, longing transforms into grief. She documents women whispering confessions in support groups: jealousy of pregnant friends, avoidance of baby showers, guilt for resentment. In these circles, longing becomes language—a communal therapy for something often unseen. Yet Boggs finds that even unfulfilled desire can carry meaning. Like Virginia Woolf’s creative struggle without children, longing redirects energy, pushing many toward art, teaching, or activism. Baby fever may ache, but it also acts as a creative and social force, a bridge between biology and imagination.

Behind Boggs’s personal story lies a systemic critique: infertility is both a medical condition and a social justice issue. She discovers that access to reproductive medicine—IVF, insemination, surrogacy—depends more on finances than need. The book meticulously exposes how insurance laws, state mandates, and profit-driven fertility clinics shape who gets to become a parent. This is not just about science but about privilege.

The Economics of Hope

Boggs describes her own experience purchasing an expensive “cost-share” IVF package—a financial gamble that felt like buying stock in her future child. This arrangement, run by a corporation managing fertility clinics, guaranteed partial refunds for failure. Through this unsettling system, she illustrates how reproductive hope becomes commodified. The irony is striking: couples must pay more to feel secure, trading peace of mind for another layer of risk. Boggs compares this to American health care itself—a landscape where healing requires both emotional and economic negotiation.

Inequality and Representation

Boggs interviews activists like Regina Townsend and Candace Trinchieri, who advocate for racial and economic inclusion in fertility care. Townsend’s organization, The Broken Brown Egg, provides community and education for African American women who feel alienated by the whiteness of fertility advertisements and support groups. These stories reveal that infertility is not a “white woman’s disease” but a widespread condition often ignored in marginalized communities. When medicine serves as a gatekeeper, social bias determines who is deemed worthy of motherhood.

Reproductive Rights and Recognition

For Boggs, the fight for fertility care parallels broader struggles for reproductive autonomy—from eugenics survivors in North Carolina to modern debates over corporate-sponsored egg freezing. Health care, she argues, must treat reproduction with the same dignity as other biological functions. Waiting should not mean exclusion. Through this lens, The Art of Waiting becomes a call for empathy in policy—a plea to recognize that the right to have or not have children is fundamental to human freedom.

Boggs turns infertility into an artistic inquiry, comparing assisted reproductive technology (ART) to creative expression. Both require imagination, risk, and surrender. Her reflections on literature—from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born—show how childlessness and creativity have long intertwined. You might see parallels in your own life: the moments when waiting for inspiration feels like waiting for something to live inside you.

Writing the Body

In rewriting her own experience, Boggs performs a literary version of reproduction—bringing life through words. She notes how women writers like Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen equated artistic failure with reproductive failure. Boggs reclaims this tension by narrating waiting itself as creation. By documenting science appointments, biological metaphors, and emotional landscapes, she turns her fertility diary into literature, making the invisible visible.

Imaginary Children and Symbolic Motherhood

In chapters such as “Imaginary Children,” Boggs interprets how art supplies surrogate offspring. She recalls creating small rituals—stuffed animals arranged as family members—and teaching schoolchildren who temporarily became her “children.” Through these metaphors, she suggests that imagination can substitute for motherhood, not in denial, but as practice. Creative work becomes a way to nurture life intellectually and emotionally when biology falters.

Patience as Creative Discipline

Above all, Boggs views waiting itself as an art. Like meditation or writing, patience transforms despair into clarity. She learns from animals, from failed treatments, and from the physical silence after cicadas die—the stillness after noise. This insight resonates beyond fertility; waiting becomes a generative state for any creator, a time when imagination gestates unseen.

Boggs expands the definition of family beyond biology. Through stories of adoption, surrogacy, and same-sex parenting, she shows how love, not genetics, constitutes kinship. These narratives challenge traditional pronatalist ideals and expose the ingenuity people use to form families amid medical and social barriers.

Adoption and Ethical Complexity

In “Just Adopt,” Boggs meets couples navigating adoption with both hope and moral weight. Parul and Nate Goetz’s story—adopting a premature infant after six miscarriages—embodies grace and loss simultaneously. Boggs juxtaposes their joy with global injustices, such as exploitative international adoptions and questionable surrogacy markets. She refuses simplistic narratives where adopting equals sainthood; instead, she frames adoption as a moral negotiation between privilege, empathy, and responsibility.

Queer Families and the Future of Parenthood

Boggs recounts how same-sex couples like Gabe and Todd navigate surrogacy and legal barriers, mirroring post-Obergefell hopes for family equality. Through scholars such as Martha Ertman and Douglas NeJaime, she connects these struggles to the broader fight for reproductive justice and marriage rights. Parenthood, she argues, has evolved beyond gender or biology—it now represents intentional commitment, built through contracts, ethics, and community support.

Chosen Families and Social Parenthood

Boggs’s encounters reveal that waiting creates unexpected family bonds: infertility groups become support networks, surrogate mothers are honored as collaborators, and teachers and artists discover care through mentorship. In defining family expansively, Boggs reminds you that belonging often begins with empathy, not inheritance. Parenthood, in this reimagined form, is a shared act of creation—emotional, social, and moral.

By the end of her journey, Boggs reframes waiting not as punishment but as a lesson in grace. Her successful IVF cycle and the birth of her daughter bring closure, but not simplification. Instead, she finds meaning in the prolonged uncertainty—the process that taught her to live deliberately in both hope and disappointment.

The Spiritual Dimension of Fertility

Boggs resists religious dogma but embraces reverence. Her reflections on animals, art, and motherhood reveal how fertility connects to compassion. The gorilla Jamani’s stillbirth and later success become metaphors for resilience; nature continues after loss without despair. Boggs learns that empathy—with oneself and others—is the true outcome of waiting.

Finding Peace in Uncertainty

She attends infertility support groups, watching women cry and celebrate, realizing that waiting binds them into community. Each cycle of hope and failure creates shared understanding. This meditation culminates in her vision of “the art of waiting” as a universal skill—a way to survive inevitable delays of love, creativity, and healing.

Beyond Fertility

Boggs’s conclusion widens toward ecology and existential reflection. The silence after the cicadas die feels like relief—a calm after obsessive striving. Perhaps, she suggests, the lesson of waiting is the rediscovery of rhythm. Life will arrive, sometimes in unexpected form, but its beauty deepens through patience. Her final image—holding her newborn amid construction workers marveling “Imagine if there were only one baby in the world”—captures her revelation: each life, once waited for, becomes art itself.