MÈRE Stories: Elle Overholt
“Deferred Hope”
My husband and I are high school sweethearts and got married pretty young — a whoping 23 years old! We definitely desired to wait a couple years to have kids and enjoy our "newlywed" days but as soon as we started to try to grow our family it wasn't nearly how we expected.
We went through a year or so of primary care evaluations to assess my hormones. Then, ultimately needed two separate endometriosis surgeries back to back years.
Almost 8 months after my second surgery and 4 years after we started to try to conceive… we were blessed with our miracle baby, Jude.
He is named after St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
So much of my struggle were in those days, months, and years trying to conceive. Once we were blessed with our pregnancy, we decided to sit back and simply trust my body and the process. I had a pretty uneventful pregnancy, beautiful birth, and peaceful postpartum.
If you had to summarize your journey in motherhood with all its challenges, how would you describe it now? How have you found a way to reclaim your strength or identity? What have you learned?There was a phrase my older sister shared with me as I waited month after month, year after year, to get that positive pregnancy test and then to finally meet my precious baby… deferred hope. I was hopeful of my motherhood "coming soon" and I believed that I would be a mother (whatever that might look like)… but I was simply living in a place of deferred hope and that surprisingly gave me lots of peace.
What advice or words of encouragement would you give another mom walking through a similar chapter? Your time will come. I remember vividly feeling the sadness of wishing and hoping and praying that we could be bringing our baby home like so many of our close friends. I listened to a podcast in my season of waiting that asked something along the lines of "if you knew you would have the thing you're praying for in 10 years, would it change how you live today." The answer for me was YES! I didn't want to wish away years of my life because I was simply in my season of waiting.
How has your journey changed you, both in ways you expected and in ways you never could have imagined?I am the mother I am today only because of the journey it took to get here. I savor every moment more, I appreciate the mundane, and I try not to wish away the current challenges. Motherhood has shaped me but moreso I feel it actually made me more of who God ultimately created me to be. More joyful, calm, and at peace.
“What I realized was all those years of wishing for our miracle, I was watching close to our friends who were teaching me how to rest, how to ask for help, how to set boundaries, how fast time flies with a baby, and so many more lessons I never could have grasped without their example. ”
—Elle Overholt