Waiting

Eva and I have been enjoying the baby laptime program every Monday morning at our local library. Today while chatting with two women who have become my library buddies, the topic turned to infertility. Both of them struggled with it for years before the birth of their children. In M's case, she and her husband tried for five years and were well into the process of adopting from China before she unexpectedly became pregnant. K's experience was much the same, to the point that she'd resigned herself to re-experiencing the anguish once she tried for another. Happily, she quickly conceived the second time. (M, by the way, is still pursuing that adoption and hopes to have a referral in a year.)

I listened, but refrained from bringing up our experience with Eva. Getting pregnant with her was the easiest thing in the world-- we made the concrete decision to try, and the next month, I was pregnant. The longer I move in circles of mothers, the more grateful I am for the ease with which Eva came into our lives.

I felt a guilty sort of kinship, however, with the looks on their faces and the way they described the interminable waiting. Though I don't have a similar story about starting a family-- and though difficulty starting a family the scope of things is so very much more serious than our situation-- some of the adjectives they used are the same I've used to describe waiting for Mr. Milkweed to find a job. It felt more than a little wrong to see a comparison between waiting for a baby and waiting for a job, and seeing it typed out like this makes it seem all the more ridiculous.

My goal for right now is to stop making such spurious connections. In this economy, as friends and family members are losing hours and jobs and even any hope of employment at all, we do still have the three jobs that keep our ship afloat. Complaints about anything else are purely selfish.