Work of Waiting

*Disclaimer: This post may provide more details about the intricacies of infertility than you are comfortable with. Feel free to stop and just pray for us at any point. We know you love us and covet your continued walk alongside us in prayer!!* 

Our medical system is pretty difficult to navigate.  You need to be extremely proactive, available between the hours of 9-5, Monday-Friday, have large amounts of money upfront and able to move about the county for multiple visits to speciality places.  As the next step in our journey to becoming parents, we are trying an IUI, intrauterine insemination.  This decision, when all is said and done, will take 4 visits to the fertility specialist, 2 visits to the pharmacy, 2 visits to 2 different labs for blood draws, 2 different medications (1 of which is a shot I give myself!) and upfront payment for the procedure.  Not to mention the cost of gas, medications, parking at said clinic/labs and time off work for visits (although 2 of the 4 visits were able to be at 7am). All within a month. Repeat 2-3 times if not successful. None of which is covered by insurance because having children is an "elective procedure."

Regardless of the monetary cost, the most stressful piece for me in all of this is the work of waiting.  Waiting for my cycle to start. Waiting for the doctor to come in the exam room to do the 4th ultrasound (if you want some real eeyore news, ask me the journey of my grief in the first half dozen ultrasounds in my life not showing another heartbeat but trying to figure out why there isn't one). Waiting in the specialty pharmacy to get my Ovidrel shot just long enough to leave in the heart of rush hour traffic home. Waiting in the lab to draw Alec's blood. Waiting for the lab to send results to the other doctor and getting a phone call that the lab forgot one of the tests. Waiting in the lab to draw Alec's blood. Again. Waiting for the long two weeks after the IUI to see the elevatrd hCG levels on the pregnancy test. Waiting. so. much. waiting.

During all this waiting, I've been digesting a book by Sue Monk Kidd (brilliant author of The Secret Life of Bees, if you need a fiction book to add to your reading list) called, When The Heart Waits. Even as I write this post, her words, God's words for me in this season, bring peace and comfort. She writes, "Most of us Christians don't know how to wait in pain...but that is where God is to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience but in the embracing of it." This idea of waiting flies in the face of our quick-fix, top-10-ways-to-save-time, pain-avoiding culture and challenges me to evaluate how I approach this journey of infertility. Do I think God is creating these struggles so I learn this soul-searching art of embracing the waiting pain? Absolutely not. But have I gotten caught up in our world's understanding of worth through productivity and mile-a-minute pace that circumvents my need for cultivating and cacooning? I'm going to have to give a hard yes to that one. I'm a Veruca Salt kinda gal. I want it all now. But, in these forced times of waiting, I am reminded of the promises God makes to so many people that require them to forgo their notion of timing and trust that God is who he says he is. Some don't do so hot (anyone thinking of Hagar and Abraham and the resulting Ishmael or the entire nation of Israel?), but God was faithful in spite of their inability to wait.  And he still is. Not that this waiting will produce a child if I'm faithful enough or just wait long enough, but the waiting refocuses my faith to the God who is grace and relationship and who calls me even me beloved.

So in the midst of my anxiety and frustration and pain, I am learning the soul-growth that comes with waiting. I'm still a childless caterpillar desperate for the day I might be a butterfly with my parent-wings. But God is teaching me how to enter the cacoon of waiting because it is precisely in that space where he is waiting for me.