Waiting for a kidney transplant is a kind of waiting I never knew existed.
It’s not just waiting for time to pass.
It’s waiting for a phone call that could change everything.
It’s waiting while trying to live a normal life that doesn’t feel normal at all.

Every day, there’s this quiet weight in the background.
You wake up and check your phone.
You go to sleep wondering if tonight could be the night.
You keep your ringer on—always,
Because that call… it means hope.

But it also means that somewhere, another family is experiencing loss.
And that’s something that never sits easy.

Waiting feels like living in two worlds at once.

In one world, Benjamin is just a 3-year-old little boy.
He laughs, plays, celebrates birthdays, and fills our days with so much love.
In the other world, he’s a transplant patient,
a child on a list,
a number in a system that determines when his second chance will come.

And as his mom, I live in both of those worlds every single day.

There’s fear.
Fear of his kidneys getting worse,
fear of the unknown,
fear of how long we will have to wait.

There’s hope.
Hope that the right donor will come at the right time,
hope that his body will stay strong until then,
hope for a future where this is just part of his story—not all of it.

And then there’s the waiting in between,
the appointments,
the lab work,
the updates that feel small but mean everything,
the constant balancing act between staying strong and feeling everything at once.

Some days, I’m okay.
Other days, the weight of it all feels overwhelming.
But through it all, Benjamin reminds me what strength really looks like.
He doesn’t carry the fear the way I do.
He just lives, fully, freely, joyfully.

And maybe that’s what keeps me going.

So we wait.
We wait with hope.
We wait with faith.
We wait for the call that will change his life forever.
Until then, we hold him a little tighter and love him a little harder.
Because even in the waiting, he is our miracle.