It’s not as though you are walking around on the verge of a breakdown every day. The ache of infertility is a constant drip, and just like anything, you learn to manage it. To have joy and live a full life in spite of the hurt.
There are several occasions that you know are going to be a challenge. Some you can even brace yourself for ahead of time, or maybe even try to avoid altogether. You don’t have to be a woman facing infertility or pregnancy loss to understand the pang of sorrow that those otherwise celebratory days like Mother’s Day or baby showers can cause. And then there are the less-obvious provocations such as walking by the baby aisle, or being asked if you have children. Those moments can catch you off guard and may even pack a different punch depending on the day, but you know they are going to happen eventually, and over time you develop a bit of a callus that allows you to keep your shtuff together and pull off a seemingly normal pretense when they do.
Coping is different for everyone, and the triggers don’t even have to make sense… they just grow to be a part of who you are.
But it is those appointments with affliction that you couldn’t have possibly prepared for – the ones that creep up on you when you least expect it – that can knock you off your feet in a life-changing sort of way.
Because we weren’t sharing our struggles with anyone, I had become a master at hiding just how deep a wound I was living with. Perhaps from myself more than anyone else. It was easier to avoid talking about my desire to be a mom altogether – to not even permit myself to think about it – and to instead channel that love and affection by way of my hat labeled “Aunt Mel-Mel”.
That hat had become a helmet of sorts, offering safety and a disguise that permitted me to do and care about things that I wouldn’t otherwise undertake. And it was within the asylum of that figurative hat – sitting in the theater next to my sister and nephews, watching a reminiscent remake of a well-known 80s musical, reliving a piece of my childhood, and singing along in my head to the tunes of hard-knocks and tomorrows – that I encountered an unexpected barrage of life-changing grief.
The attack came in the form of a song. One that I hadn’t recalled from the original film, and was not prepared to confront. A little orphan girl dreaming about the parents she didn’t know and all of the maybes that went along with that. “Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby, he may be pouring her coffee, she may be straightening his tie…”
It may go down in history as the biggest duh moment of all time, but up until that point I hadn’t truly wrestled with the idea that maybe our story wasn’t just one of infertility and waiting. Or that maybe somewhere there was a child who was dreaming about us the same way that we were dreaming about them. Or at the very least, needing us to give them a chance. Maybe this whole time I had thought we were waiting on God, while He was patiently waiting on us. Maybe adoption was a part of His plan all along.
So there I sat, in a theater full of children, all choked up and facing an entire gamut of maybes for the first time. Adoption was officially on my heart. And I couldn’t wait to go home and talk to my husband about whether it had been on his.
