The Awkwardness of In-Between

Hear my prayer, O Lord,

    and give ear to my cry;

    hold not your peace at my tears!

For I am a sojourner with you,

    a guest, like all my fathers.

13 

Look away from me, that I may smile again,

    before I depart and am no more! - Ps 39:12-13

Although seeing God's sovereignty and provision for me was a blessing and balm to my soul, it was not an immediate magical fix for everything. For example, Mother's Day. Oh how I hated Mother's Day. It became my least favorite holiday ever. There was just so. much. awkwardness.

Often, people tried to sympathize and be helpful and sensitive to infertility. Like, oh all the women at church can take a rose on Mother's Day because you're all some "type" of mother. No. Just stop. I know most people meant well. But it bothered me because people thought they understood when they really didn't. And they usually wanted so badly to convince me that they "got it," when in reality there's no possible way that they could understand.

I've had some conversations where people were basically like "Oh I know how hard it is, waiting every month to see if you get your period or not. It took us a really long time to get pregnant too. A whole 8 months." Yeah. Right. Try every month for 8 years. Or when someone tries to convince me that I'm lucky because I don't "have to deal with kids". Really? If you don't want yours, I'll gladly take them off your hands. I stopped going to baby showers years ago because I couldn't celebrate without crying or getting jealous. Amongst all this, learning how to wait and really trust God was just. so. hard.

There was just this long phase of never-ending awkwardness. Not being anything close to a newlywed but also not having any children. It was hard to relate and keep up with my friends because they all had multiple children by then and their lives were so different from mine. But everyone younger was either newly engaged, or newly married, or just had their first baby. I mean, who's left to hang out with and relate to? You know, from that huge pool of conservative Christian people in their 30's without children. Awkward.

And classes and activities at church are often geared either toward new marriage or faithful parenting because surely EVERYONE is in one of those two stages. Awkward. And then the familiar conversation: "Do you have children?" Nope. And then one of two responses: "Oh that's nice, just you and your husband free to do what you want." or "Oh when are you planning to start trying?". Awkward.

And so many other awkward situations: serving in the nursery at church when people aren't sure whether you are capable of taking care of their kid or not, being a creeper at the playground because you're meeting a friend and her kids, going to play dates alone just for a chance to socialize with your friends, taking my nephew to the store and listening to people tell me how cute he is and that I "seem to have this mom thing down", etc. Like a sojourner with no land, no home, no people.

 

I often wish I would have journaled during this time because it difficult to reach back in my already spotty memory to remember details of things I'd sometimes rather forget. But it has been good for me to remember what I can and share. It's another opportunity to see God's faithfulness! And I'm clinging to it. Because whether we are sojourning in the in-between for a short time or for our entire lives, we still have a home in Christ our sympathizer.

Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. - Phil. 3:20