It's been months since I've been on here (okay, years), and I find that I miss it...very much! I enjoy writing and with two little ones and another one on the way (yes, we're pregnant again!), I find that time for writing is even more scarce.
Today I'm in the process of writing and wrapping up all the content for my website for my business, Sarah's Soaps. As I was looking around on my hard drive for some of my earlier relevant writings, I ran across a book I had started about our journey through infertility and our wait for God's plan for our family.
It's amazing how much emotion I felt just reading the first chapter over again. Those days seem like a lifetime ago yet are still so vivid in my memory. It got me thinking that maybe I should pick it back up and finish our story.
Of course, I can't mention all of this and not share at least some part of it with you! I don't know who follows my blog anymore and considering I haven't had a post in over a year, I'm certain that I get zero traffic these days. I don't know if my life is any more exciting, but I do think it's more purposeful now that I'm a mother. Take a peak at the first chapter and, who knows? Maybe I will finish it. Maybe I will also start posting on here more too. Maybe we'll have a new pope by Easter. Maybe, maybe, maybe. We'll see!
Waiting on Our Quiver
a Story of a childless couple who found that faith and God is greater than science
by
Sarah E. Rose
Chapter One
“In the Beginning”
It wasn’t fair. She was four and a half months pregnant and her waist was still smaller than mine. Yet she just sat there and went on and on about putting on weight. “My legs rub together when I walk,” “I’ve got cottage cheese legs.” I tried to remain sympathetic, but a hidden part of me was grinning. That part of me that just wanted to say, “Now you know how I feel.” Except for me…. I’d never known it to be different.
It is the ultimate revenge of larger women. The idea, that someday, that cute, little, petite thing would experience the personal pain of weight gain. Unfortunately for us, all they ever do is put on 5 to 10 pounds and then complain about how their once skinny body has just become a little curvier. Yeah, we’ll hear them whine for a couple of weeks and then after a diet consisting of water and lettuce, finally watch them “shrink” down from a size six to a size four.
We’ll spend the rest of our dieting lives trying to understand what it would be like if we were them. Doubtful if they ever think the reverse.
It was a typical day though, and silently, I was amused by her predicament. Though her self-centered fat-consumed hysteria made me smile, inside I was dying. She was where I wanted to be. No, now don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t jealous of her job or even her size, I was jealous of the bulge she carried around. I wanted to be the pregnant one.
I don’t think two people could ever want a child as badly as my husband and I did. We hadn’t been married long, less than a year to be exact, but we both were yearning for children. We were trying too, but not quite as successful as my smaller co-worker. We couldn’t tell anyone, they would think we were crazy. Why, I could hear my family now, “A BABY!!! You haven’t even been married for a year yet. Don’t you know that it is best for a young couple to wait for at least…. at least five years!!!”
I never understood the ‘five year’ thing. You know, all married couples do it. It's like a right of passage. Once you hit the five-year mark…. BOOM – baby. If it happens before the five years – people think, “Oh, that was an accident.” If you're any later than that ‘golden opportunity,’ people say, “Poor souls, they must have fertility problems.” It was if the stork took five years to find your house.
We were newlyweds, living on love, luck, and two small, but significant paychecks. Our ‘first house’ was a run-down rental, maybe 900 square feet, on the side of the highway. We still hadn’t completely unpacked yet. We shuffled around boxes on a daily basis, so much to the point that if you got up in the middle of the night to pee, you knew where not to step.
This first little house was a big deal for us. Prior to our little ‘love cottage’ we had lived in an old 1920’s apartment building with my former roommate, Jennifer (yes, in all these instances, we were technically ‘living in sin’); an efficiency studio apartment (basically a bedroom with a kitchen) in a downtown building; my husband’s parent’s basement; and then my own mother’s house – all within less than a year before we got married. Our newly rented home was our 900 square feet of paradise.
The house sat on a hill, about 50 feet from the main highway that ran through town. To one side of us there was another small rental where a local youth pastor and his wife lived. Behind us was another rental home; an odd shaped, slightly shorter house than ours. We later discovered that it was in fact an old Circus trailer converted into the little rental home (curiosity did get the better of us and we went to meet our neighbor one day for the sole purpose of seeing the interior of the house – we had to duck the whole time while inside). Of course, in front our house was the highway and to the other side a gigantic kudzu patch that sported two main figures – a telephone pole disguised as a giant green giraffe and a dead tree pretending to be the world’s last great dinosaur. Both were equally dominate and fought control over the small yard on the side of our little love nest.
We moved into this home shortly before our wedding in May of 2000. So between the wedding plans, church activities (yes, people ‘living in sin’ do actually go to church), the new home, and the war against the intimidating kudzu creatures, we had absolutely no time to unpack, let alone to have a baby. But, we still so desperately wanted a child; I remember thinking that as soon as we were married we could ‘officially’ start trying. As a matter of fact, the day before we got married, we visited one of Justin’s stranger friends, Camel, and his girlfriend, Angel. Angel was a self-proclaimed psychic and insisted that I was pregnant. I remember very vividly her waving her hand over my belly all the while stating that I was with child. When we headed back to our home to get ready for the rehearsal dinner, I thought how wonderful it would be if her ‘vision’ was in fact true. She couldn’t have been any more wrong though; I started my period on our wedding day and it has been an anniversary present ever since.
Here I sat, at work, with this beautifully pregnant co-worker and all I wanted was what she already had. We were trying; desperately we were trying. Even in those early days, I was overcome with a sense of fear. In my gut, I had a sickening feeling, premonition if you will, that conceiving a child would be very difficult for us. I wanted reason to hope, but it had already been almost a year and still nothing. Wasn’t this the time when other couples started to worry? In an effort to ease my concerns and to offer me some minute amount of hope, I stopped at a store on my way home and purchased two pairs of baby socks and a pacifier.
“Your crazy,” I thought, “You have no idea when you’ll ever have children or even IF you’ll ever have children and here you are buying baby stuff.” I couldn’t help myself. A flood of emotions overcame me. I was hit with happiness and feelings of despair all at the same time. I wanted two tiny feet to put in those socks, I wanted that little mouth to suckle on that pacifier and nuzzle at my breast. I was envisioning a child that wasn’t even created, but yet I still felt so much love. Then reality set in. Where was this child? When would this child come?
I kept those socks and pacifier in my nightstand drawer as a reminder. This was my reminder of why I charted, why I temped, why I tracked mucus changes, and why we had sex at such odd and tiring hours. Our little ‘love cottage’ was turning into a breeding house and it was very energy draining.
One night, after realizing that another month had passed and we still weren’t pregnant, I broke down. I got out of bed sobbing and headed to the bathroom. I remember the painful cramps, the beginning of my period. I kept thinking, “This is worse than normal, something is wrong.” Justin tiredly came to my aid and I crouched in the hallway and wept. He put his arms around me and asked about the pain. I knew what was coming, I knew why I was in pain, but I wanted it to be for another reason. I thought to myself, “At least if I were miscarrying, I would then know we COULD get pregnant.” What was this? I was wanting to lose a baby! I wanted a reason for the unbearable cramps; I wanted to know that it wasn’t just another monthly expression of my barrenness. I wanted to feel a life inside of me.
This little house had room; it had room for three. We had an awkward ‘guest room,’ but we both knew it was to be the nursery. Every decision we made in those early days was done with complete consideration of a family we hadn’t yet had. Should we buy this car? Are we saving enough? Does this job offer maternity leave? We were ready, but still nothing came. Countless prayer after prayer, and nothing. Did God even hear us?
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