Nature, Chaos, and Powerlessness Theme Analysis

Throughout “Waiting,” the narrator frames nature as a destructive force that stirs chaos throughout her life. Nature is responsible for her miscarriages, for her husband’s crops failing, and—in general—for “whipping the rug out from under [them]” so many times in their lives. Amidst all this destructive chaos, the narrator and her husband wait eagerly, though powerlessly, for some kind of order to emerge or for something to go their way. In the end, though, it seems that all they can do is wait. In this way, Cate Kennedy suggests that people are generally powerless over their fates. Tragedy and chaos are always close at hand, and the only way forward is to accept this and try to pick up the pieces.

Cate Kennedy first shows nature’s destructive power in the failure of Pete’s wheat crop. Pete—and many other local farmers—planted wheat earlier in the spring, hoping for good weather. But hoping isn’t enough to make nature cooperate. The spring has been too warm for wheat to thrive, and most neighboring farmers have already given up and fed their failed wheat to their cows. The narrator implies that Pete, too, will give up soon. This is a major loss—the weather is destroying not just the wheat, but also Pete’s livelihood, showing how far-reaching and personal the cruelty of nature can be.

As nature takes its toll on Pete’s wheat, the narrator also sees herself as a victim of nature. She shows this through the metaphors she uses for her miscarriages. For instance, when describing an ultrasound, she compares her body to a “human map” (likening herself to a landmass) and compares her imminent miscarriage to a “cyclone gathering its bleary force offshore.” In this sense, the narrator explicitly sees miscarriage as a destructive natural event that she’s powerless to prevent. She also frequently uses tidal imagery to describe her miscarriages (“an estuarine feeling ebbing away” or “that tide ebbing again”), which implies that she sees them as cyclical and inevitable, like the tides. All of this suggests the narrator’s feeling of powerlessness over nature, which extends to her own body. No matter what she does, she cannot stop nature from destroying her pregnancies, just like it ruins the crops.

While the narrator has no control over chaos and destruction, she can control how she reacts to it. This is the basis of her pragmatism; instead of dwelling on her suffering (or being a “martyr,” as she says), she simply does her best to carry on with her life. In the face of tragedy, she is “just someone who can see what needs doing, and does it.” But pragmatism takes a toll on the narrator. She admits this subtly through her repeated description of feeling like she’s carrying a “shallow bowl of water” in her chest while trying desperately to keep it from tipping. As water is associated with nature, the notion that she’s struggling to keep it from spilling suggests that nature is always on the brink of overwhelming her. She says of the bowl of water that she “ache[s] with holding it steady,” showing how her practical attempts to hold herself together in the face of tragedy are painful and perhaps impossible to sustain.

Pragmatism is how the narrator acts in the face of chaos, but she also carefully describes how she thinks about everything terrible that has happened to her. She articulates this most clearly near the end of the story when she’s describing the “natural course” of her pregnancy (miscarriage) and lamenting that she’s had enough of nature. “I’m waiting for something comprehensible,” she says, “to jump out of this garbled mess and make sense to me.” This moment frames the conflict between herself and nature as a conflict of order and chaos—and importantly, she seems to understand that she cannot create the order she desires, but must instead simply wait to see if it comes.

The “waiting” of the story’s title, then, has two meanings: the narrator is waiting for her ultrasound appointment, but she’s also waiting for something in her life to finally go her way. This insight helps to make sense of the magazine horoscope in the story’s opening line, which tells the narrator that “everything will align” for her at a time when she least expects it. The language of alignment suggests order appearing from chaos—a line emerging from scattered points. But it’s not clear whether this is truly an optimistic message: a horoscope ostensibly predicts the future, but this one insists that the future is impossible to predict. It’s possible to see the horoscope as evidence that things might improve for the narrator—after all, she is currently in a moment where she doesn’t expect things to get better, which the horoscope suggests might mean that alignment is near. However, the overall message of the horoscope is that nobody can force nature to cooperate, and that the narrator has no control over her fate. Order may emerge out of chaos—but all she can do is wait.