I was, unkindly, reminded that it's been over one year since I said I 'for sure' wanted to have a baby by now. I said that so many years ago, when the word 'sure' was still in my vocabulary. When ignorant and blunt, yet optomistic, statements weren't like a sucker punch in the gut. When I didn't have a three bedroom home that I had to fill with everything BUT what I wanted to fill it with.
By now, I've seriously considered I will never be a parent. I still haven't heard that concretely, but to be realistic it has to be something I grant as possible. Each day, it's more possible, and more likely.
Now is when I'm hearing more things like, 'don't say that, it WILL happen,' or, 'it happened to (fill in the blank) after 5 (or 7, or 10) years of trying, can't give up hope yet'. They obviously don't realize hope is harder to hold on to the longer you've been holding on to it. Of course I want to keep hoping, but it has to be a realistic hope. "You aren't giving up are you?" No, but I don't want to talk as if being barren is an impossibility. I don't want to talk about 'always being able to adopt'. People always seem to say the same things, as if the typical solutions apply to EVERY couple who can't have children on their own.
They don't know my husband's faith in himself as a father is completely tied to God providing us a child, not searching out one for ourselves. They don't know that I don't want to be an 'old' parent if I can help it. Even at the age of 31 I think I'm too young to lose a parent, yet my husband has already lost a parent to cancer, I don't want to increase the chance my children are going to lose us at far too young an age just because I wanted to have a child no matter how long it took. Not to mention the risks that presents to giving birth, and that child's health, if it happens naturally. They don't know that we're not willing to spend thousands of dollars on a chance, especially a chance that could either result in 6 children, or force abortion of 'extra' fertilized eggs.
We are willing to let God be in complete control of if and when and how we have a child, we're just waiting on Him. There is no 'for sure', there is no set path that we childless people can just follow. Our path is ours, and no one elses, we have to figure out our own balance of faith, hope and realism until the waiting is over.
