Waiting

With one step taken and completed and the next one on the horizon we are back to waiting. How long we will be waiting I am not sure but it is still waiting and it got me thinking about how much waiting I have done over the last few years. When we started our trying for our family it was waiting for the right time of the month and then it became waiting for our 'one year' milestone and a doctors appointment. That started a period of time in which we were waiting for the right time of the month plus waiting for tests, waiting for results and waiting for appointments.

Waiting for treatment didn't really happen as we went for an appointment and it was there. There was a short wait getting the prescription through and sorted but this was short enough to be over looked based on who long we had waited already.

The next rounds of waiting occurred after I fell pregnant. Waiting for blood tests and their results and then the dreadful pause in which everything stopped for me but really I was waiting for it all to be, medically, over. I had to wait for my bleeding to start and then I had to wait for it to stop. After that the cycles continued until the time we chose for it to end.

I got to wait for more exciting times after that. We had agreed to follow the adoption road but there are criteria - 6 months clear of treatment before initial assessment which was completely understandable. Another 6 months before the start of the preparation course (which has flown past) and whilst it has started to feel a bit more 'real' than it did, it still doesn't feel like there is an end in sight. There are still plenty of things to wait for - the start of home study, the end of home study, our approval panel and then hopefully a more exciting period where we wait for a match to be found.

I reckon I have become so used to waiting I have not realised that I have, somewhere along this road, learnt at least a little patience. Some of the waits that seemed forever back at the start of the road were actually a lot shorter than the waits that have flown past but overall my wait for a family is currently on 3 years and 8 months - all in. Sounds like a long time and it has been, especially we have no idea how much longer it might be but, for some, the wait for a family is so much longer than this and I feels right to remind myself that no matter how long I have waited there will be someone somewhere that has to wait longer.