My First Mother’s Day: Holding Hope, Holding It All

This is my first Mother’s Day.

A sentence that probably sounds simple to most people, but to me, it carries the weight of years.

Six years, to be exact.

Six years of longing, waiting & hoping in ways that stretched me beyond what I thought I would survive. It’s a day I thought I’d never get to celebrate. And now, she’s here. My beautiful girl.

Motherhood is everything I imagined. Soft, overwhelming, beautiful in ways I don’t even have words for. And still, if I’m honest, it isn’t only that. Because alongside the gratitude and joy, there are other feelings too. Quieter feelings that don’t take away from the happiness, but exist alongside it.

My beautiful daughter is called Hope-Evelyn. A name I chose long before she existed, back in 2023.

“Hope” might sound obvious. But it was never just a name to me. It was survival.

Hope was the thread that carried me through every injection, every procedure, every setback, every moment where fear threatened to swallow me whole. Hope is what kept me going when stopping would have been easier.

I didn’t just hold onto hope. Hope held onto me, and now, I get to hold her.

She isn’t only named Hope — she is the living, breathing embodiment of everything that word meant to me during those years. Proof that even in the darkest seasons, some part of us keeps believing. Keeps trusting. Keeps reaching forward. Hoping.

And “Evelyn,” more quietly, means “wished-for child.”

And she is exactly that.

Every whispered prayer. Every birthday wish. Every 11:11. Every Christmas wish that I wrapped up silently and placed under my tree. Every Mother’s Day ache. She is all of it, made real.

As a psychotherapist, I spend so much time sitting with people in the space where conflicting emotions coexist. Where grief and joy can sit side by side. Where love and fear exist together.

And now I understand that space in a completely different way myself. Because the truth is this: the baby you finally hold does not erase the pain it took to get there.

It doesn’t undo the years of longing. The grief. The fear. The exhaustion. The strength it took to keep showing up over and over again.

That pain doesn’t disappear the second your dream arrives. It changes shape. It softens around the edges. But it stays part of you.

And for me, motherhood after IVF carries its own emotional complexity that people don’t talk about enough. Nobody really prepares you for what happens after the baby arrives. For the way your brain struggles to catch up to the reality that this is actually yours. That you really made it here. It’s over.

Even during pregnancy, I don’t think I ever fully exhaled. After IVF, your mind becomes wired for disaster. You wait for bad news. You try to protect yourself from heartbreak before it arrives.

I don’t think my brain could fully process that this was truly happening to me. That we would actually get to the finish line. I felt like I held my breath for nine months.

And even now, holding her in my arms, there are still quiet questions that creep in sometimes.

• Will she be my only child?

• Will this be my only experience of pregnancy?

• Will I ever get to live through this again without fear sitting beside it?

Those thoughts can exist alongside overwhelming gratitude. Both things can be true, because IVF changes you. Infertility changes you.

You don’t walk through years of uncertainty and come out untouched. But if there is one thing I know for certain today, looking back, it’s this:

I became her mother long before I ever held her.

In every moment I chose to keep going. In every tear, every appointment, every fear I carried quietly (and sometimes loudly). In every ounce of strength that showed up, that I didn’t know I had, I was becoming her mother.

And the depth of the love I feel for her now is not separate from that journey. It is because of it. The darkness didn’t lessen my love, it deepened it.

Motherhood has changed me in ways I’m still discovering. It has softened me in some ways. The sharp edges I used to carry feel different now. But it has also made me fiercer than I have ever been. There is a strength in me that feels instinctive. The kind that would walk through fire for her without hesitation.

Motherhood itself is made up mostly of tiny moments.

Feeding her. Soothing her. Rocking her back to sleep.

Repeating the same cycles over and over. Sometimes it can feel mundane. And then suddenly she looks at me, or smiles at me, or settles into my chest and I feel something so overwhelming it almost hurts. A love so deep it takes my breath away.

I have never known anything like it. And I feel profoundly aware of what it took to get here. I do not take a single second of this for granted.

• Not one cuddle.

• Not one sleepless night.

• Not one breath.

And so today, I hold space not just for myself, but for every woman still in the waiting.

To every mother still wishing, still hoping, still praying — I see you. I know how heavy that longing can feel.

I know the quiet heartbreak of wanting something so deeply while trying to survive the waiting.

And I hope, that your story finds its way to you too, in a way even more beautiful than you ever imagined.

But until then, your grief deserves space too. Your pain deserves compassion.Your journey matters exactly as it is.

This Mother’s Day, I am holding it all.

• The joy.

• The love.

• The gratitude.

• The healing.

• The fear.

And the echoes of everything it took to get here.

And somehow, all of it together…feels like Hope.