The Two Week Wait as a Solo Mum — And How to Actually Get Through It
Fourteen days. No one to obsess with. Here's what helps.
There is a specific kind of torture that fertility specialists call the luteal phase and everyone else calls the two week wait (TWW).
It is the time between embryo transfer or ovulation and the blood test that tells you whether it worked. Fourteen days. Give or take.
In those fourteen days, you will analyse every twinge. You will google things you should not google. You will take a test too early and convince yourself the line means something it probably doesn't. You will have one hour of certainty that it worked and one hour of certainty that it didn't, sometimes within the same afternoon.
And you will do all of this without a partner to share the obsessing with.
That is the specific texture of the two week wait as a solo mum. Not harder than doing it with a partner — different. The absence of someone to process it with in real time is its own particular thing.
This is what I know about getting through it.
First — what is actually happening in your body
Understanding the biology doesn't make the wait easier, exactly. But it does make the symptom-spotting slightly less all-consuming when you understand why your body is doing what it's doing.
If you've done a fresh or frozen embryo transfer, your embryo is attempting to implant in the lining of your uterus. This process takes several days. The medications you're on — progesterone in particular — will give you symptoms that are virtually indistinguishable from early pregnancy symptoms. Bloating, breast tenderness, cramping, fatigue, mood swings. These are medication symptoms, not necessarily pregnancy symptoms. This is important to remember at 11pm on day eight when you are convinced one breast feels different to the other.
If you've done IUI or at-home AI, the same applies — you're waiting to see whether fertilisation occurred and whether a fertilised egg has implanted. The timeline is similar. The symptom confusion is identical.
Your blood test measures hCG — human chorionic gonadotropin — the hormone produced when an embryo implants. You cannot reliably detect this with a home test until at least 10-14 days after transfer. Testing earlier gives you an unreliable result and ten additional days of anxiety. This is easier said than not done.
The things that actually help
Tell one person what cycle day you're on.
Not everyone. Not social media. One person — a friend, your mum, someone who will check in without making it bigger than it already is.
The two week wait is not a secret you have to keep entirely. Having one person who knows roughly where you are means you're not completely carrying it on your own. Even a text that just says "day 8, still waiting" and gets back "thinking of you" is something.
Move your body — gently.
Not a marathon. A walk. Gentle yoga. Swimming. Something that gets you out of your head and into your body in a way that feels kind rather than punishing.
There is genuine evidence that stress affects implantation outcomes, which is the most stressful thing you can tell someone in the two week wait. So: not to stress you out, but movement is genuinely useful right now. Not because it will definitely make a difference to the result — because it gives you somewhere to put the energy that has nowhere else to go.
Do the distractions on purpose.
This sounds obvious and is actually harder than it sounds. A good distraction is one you are actively choosing, not one you're falling into to avoid the anxiety.
Book the thing. Make the plan. Sign up for the class you've been meaning to do. Watch the series in one sitting. Cook the thing that takes two hours. The two week wait is not the time to be productive. It's the time to be distracted, intentionally, with things that actually engage your brain.
Limit the googling. Seriously.
Set a rule for yourself. One google session a day, or none at all, or only on specific days. The internet will not tell you anything useful that your clinic has not already told you. What it will tell you is seventeen contradictory anecdotes that will leave you more confused and more anxious than before you started.
You already know everything you need to know. The test will tell you the rest.
The 3am rule.
Whatever happens at 3am stays at 3am. Decisions made at 3am are not real decisions. Conclusions reached at 3am are not reliable conclusions. If you wake up in the middle of the night convinced it hasn't worked — write it down if you need to, breathe, and wait until morning to decide how you feel.
In a solo mum community, someone is always awake at 3am. This is genuinely one of the most useful things about finding your people during treatment — the post that goes out at 3am gets a response at 3:07 from someone on the other side of the country who is also awake, also waiting, also in it.
Use affirmations — not because they're magic, but because they're practice.
Affirmations are not a guarantee. Saying "I will hold my baby in my arms" does not make it more likely that your embryo implants. I want to be completely clear about that.
What they do is give your brain somewhere to land that is not the anxiety spiral. They interrupt the loop. They are a practice, not a promise — and in the two week wait, having a practice matters.
I wrote 16 of them — across the 14 days of the wait. They're free to download below.
On the result
Whatever the result is, you will get through it.
A positive result does not mean the end of anxiety — for many solo mums who've been through treatment, the positive test is followed by a new wave of worry, hypervigilance, and the particular vulnerability of early pregnancy after IVF. That is completely normal and there is support for it.
A negative result is genuinely one of the hardest things. Give yourself the day, or the week, or however long you need. And then, when you're ready, you and your specialist will talk about what next looks like.
Neither outcome is the end of the story.
The wait is finite.
This is the thing I come back to every time. Fourteen days is fourteen days. However long each one feels, it ends. The test happens. You know. And then you take the next step.
You don't have to have it all figured out before that happens. You just have to get through today.
For the full book — including colouring pages, Sudoku, journalling prompts, playlists and baby name pages:
👉 Get the Two Week Wait book →
And if you want to be around women who are going through exactly this right now — The Bump is the membership community built for solo mums in the TTC and pregnant stage.
Alisha Burns is the founder of Solo Mum Society and a solo mum by choice. Her daughter was conceived via donor conception and born in 2020. Solo Mum Society is Australia's leading community for women choosing solo motherhood by choice. This blog is for general informational purposes only. Fertility circumstances vary significantly between individuals. Please seek personalised advice from a fertility specialist and financial advisor for your specific situation.