Gnawing

Anyone who's lived in an area where it snows a lot during the winter understands that feeling that comes around February. The one where it feels like there's something in that space between your stomach and your throat kind of gnawing away and if you don't get to go play in the grassy yard RIGHT NOW you'll explode. It's the house-bound ache that can start to drive you out of your mind if you live somewhere that snows you in for six months of the year. I grew up in Minnesota so I'm familiar with that desperate crazy gnawing.

I never expected to feel that down here in "sunny" SC, half an hour from the beach. This time the ache's not caused by snow or cold or not being able to leave the house. It's still the same gnawing, in the same place... but it's caused by not yet having my children. I've wanted to be a mom... expected to become a mom... a couple of years after getting married. I started looking into adoption via Google at least two years before Lanse was ready to start discussing it. It took us another couple of years to get to the emotional place where we could make the first contact with an agency. And, according to the posts in this blog archive, we placed that call over two years ago. We will hopefully be done with the home study by the end of next month, and that's when the 'waiting' in adoption traditionally begins.

Everyone whose adopting stories I've read has expressed the huge amount of waiting that goes on through this process, but I had always interpreted the feelings as impatience or exasperation, or just a general intellectual annoyance at elapsing time. I really had no idea it would feel like this. Of course, having no recourse against it all I can do is analyze and try to figure out why I feel so weighed down and suffocated with this desire of motherhood; I know I don't need to have my own children to survive, or anything desperate like that. We've done rather well as a couple with cats making it into our mid 30s. I'm studying to be a teacher, and I know that fulfills me. So why this horrible ache for my own?

My child, should you ever read this, know that you are wanted. I want you so desperately that sometimes it hurts in my heart that I have to wait for you to come. I love you so much already, and I don't even know who you are. But some day soon, we will be a family...