If there is something I am learning more about than I expected in this time, it is about waiting. I am an incredibly impatient person. At school, I’m fairly calm. In fact, throughout the years prior to being a teacher, my teacher training and since becoming a teacher, something I am often being told is that I am very calm and patient with the children in my class.
Lucky them, because if they knew me at home and saw me when I wanted something, they would realise that that is not real. Patience is not one of my strengths. On the outside, I may look patient, but on the inside there is not a single inch of me that happily will wait for what I desire.
The difference with infertility when compared with other things, is that usually I know when it is coming. But with infertility, it isn’t even a case of ‘when’ it is coming, it is purely a case of ‘if’. We may never have our own biological child. It may never, ever happen.
And so waiting is hard enough, but knowing that all of this time we are spending waiting may lead to nothing is absolutely soul-destroying.
But…
I have got to a point where I am hurting so incredibly deeply. Every single day I am forcing myself to smile and turning off the emotions when people ask how I am.
Yet I am also trying so desperately to enjoy the waiting. I am trying to look for things to be grateful for in the waiting.
If I had a tenner for every time someone said, “Enjoy the waiting!” I’d genuinely be a very rich woman.
I am enjoying spending time with my husband, which is usually laying on the sofa, binge watching some Netflix show, which I know wouldn’t happen without trying to console a screaming baby, or change a nappy, or feed a hungry child, if we had children. For that extra time with my husband, I am so grateful.
I am enjoying looking at, booking and going on holidays and weekends away with my husband. With children, we know that our wages would not afford the cost of taking little ones on the types of holidays we love. Yay, I get to do this a little longer.
We love hanging out with our friends. Most have children so we get to go to their homes while the children sleep and we get to spend precious time with our friends. With children, we would have to stay at home. We are so grateful for this.
We go for spontaneous meals out, we don’t have to get children up and ready in the morning, we don’t have to plan for childcare, we can go to bed not having to wake up several times to look after a tired and weary child. We can just 100% focus on us.
Which is great. I love our lives this way. Yet I am longing for something different.
Waiting is painful.
But I am really trying to learn to look for the beauty in our waiting.
The biggest, and most powerful thing I have through our waiting though, is that hope is the answer. Without hope, I would have nothing left. It is hope that has help me get myself together, every day, and keep me going when I thought I had no strength left. The hope that I believe God gives is beyond words and in the waiting, is the most powerful gift I have ever received.
And hope does not disappoint…
Romans 5:5
Journeying to Family 