The One in Which There’s No Mountain Too Great

This post is brought to you by this song from the Lion King. 

Spoilers: This one's a bit rambly.

Once upon a time, I was standing at the shuttle stop around the corner from my very first apartment. 

It was early, I had a day full of labwork before me, and my feet were probably too cold because a) I’m stubborn, and b) at the time I believed that socks were silly. (It was the dawn of my first winter in Ohio after living in Florida for four years.) 

I looked up, and I saw some words scrawled on the back of a no-parking sign. They seemed prescient and they made me smile, so I snapped a pic: 

Do it, doer. 

All throughout my life, both before and after that morning, these words have kinda been my MO. When I’ve wanted things, I’ve gone after them. I’m very used to making things happen. 

I liked a guy in college, so I asked him out. (He started dating someone else the next week, but it’s fine.) I decided that I needed to make more adult friends, so I joined a young adult’s group that Ted happened to join a month later. I was really scared about the prospect of having to choose between working full time and staying home with a kid, so I quit my job and started my own business. 

I’m a doer. I do stuff. If I set my sights on a goal, it’s (usually) gonna get done. 

To an annoying extent, really: I can get obsessive. Sometimes, I’ve got a one-track mind, and I have a hard time compartmentalizing. 

But for the most part, I’ve seen this as a virtue. I do things, I take charge, I work hard and I get stuff done are just about as much a part of me as my name and the fact that, now, I like a pair of warm socks about as much as Dumbledore [says he] does. That was how my parents raised me; that’s how I’ve lived my life. 

I remember hearing that song by Avicii a while back - the one that goes I hope I get the chance to travel the world, but I don’t have any plans. I want to yell at Avicii. Buy a ticket, I think. Get a map. If finances are low or (random idea) there’s a travel ban or whatever, make a Pinterest board. Start planning. Otherwise, it’s not gonna happen, silly. 

As songs go, I tend to be more you get nothing if you wait for it, wait for it, wait for it. (Hamilton.) 

When Ted and I got married, we started metaphorically running at a breakneck pace for the first few years of our marriage. We got married. Immediately, we adopted a dog. We bought a house. We started painting and renovating that house. We adopted another dog. I switched careers. We both started investing a million hours a week into our jobs. A worldwide pandemic struck. Even over the last months that we’ve been working from home, even when we should absolutely be taking advantage of the time we have to chill a bit, we’re still tackling project after project, because we’re both doers, and we cannot take a break. 

But now - we’re running out of projects. Our pre-kid to-do list is dwindling.

Now, we’re finding ourselves in a situation where running around, trying our best to stay busy - that’s not gonna be something we can do much longer. Quite practically speaking; we’re looking at a winter we’re going to spend almost entirely alone and mostly inside. 

We’re finding ourselves faced with a situation where we have nothing to do but wait. And that scares me. 

Waiting is my very least favorite thing to do. 

It’s boring. It’s passive. It feels like the very definition of unproductive. 

But maybe, you know, it isn’t. 

Waiting: Perhaps it’s actually a thing that’s bred into each of us, a secret sauce that makes the end of the wait sweeter, the anticipation or the suffering that helps mold us into the people that we need to be. 

Perhaps - or, well, at this point, hopefully, because what alternatives do we have? - waiting isn’t innately unproductive. 

Perhaps the very fact that I hate it so much shows me what I most need to learn. Being forced to wait for something I want so much takes away my control - which, likely, shows me something very important about myself. It’s the darker side of that do it, doer mentality, the control-freak side of me, the version of myself that would probably be a despot in another life, or something. (Remind me not to believe in reincarnation; that’ll take me to a weird place.)

Waiting. After 28 years of being very proud of my ability to make things happen, it’s probably about time that I learn to sit and calmly wait. 

As I write this, it’s November 30th, 2020. We’re starting the four weeks of Advent prior to what will, hopefully, be the quietest Christmas of our lives. 

This may come as a surprise, but I’ve never quite seen the point of Advent? Four weeks dedicated to waiting, like, as a cool and special thing? I mean, sign me up for literally anything else. 

This year, as we get ready to celebrate another Christmas with just the two of us, I’m going to challenge myself to lean into this season of waiting; to see it as a blessing, an opportunity for growth and anticipation and being sculpted, or whatever else happens when one waits well. 

Idk, I’m no expert. Currently, I wait as one strapped unwillingly to a dentist’s chair. This year, I’m … just going to start trying to turn that around. 

Anyway. We had an idea, last night - both of us, actually, independent of one another; which is usually something that makes us pay attention. 

Here’s the thing: We’re infertile. (This wasn’t the idea.) 

Sometimes, I like to look at my calendar and wonder which days we’ll be celebrating in the future; which days will be accompanied by wrapped presents and candles on a cake and whatever traditions our family builds to celebrate the birthdays of our children. You know - the ones we haven’t yet met. 

We don’t know which days those are. 

Could be any one. It’s a mystery. 

This year, as we start to move through Advent; as we try to lean into this probably-important waiting thing, it occurred to us that being able to anticipate the birthday of a child whose birthday we do know about, that we can put on the calendar - that’s probably something we should pay a little more attention to. 

It could be a hot minute before we get do do that with a child of our own. But that’s okay. We’re waiting for that - and we’re gonna get really good at waiting for that.

For right now, there are 26 days until His day. We don’t know how long we’re waiting for our child - but we know how long we’re waiting for this one. 

And it’s just a little bit nice to know that, this Advent, for this Child, all we need to do is be still and be ready.

All we need to do is wait. 

Ted, any last thoughts? We’ll be back to funny gifs and etc next time.

Advent and that whole “waiting” thing are different this year.

It feels more like pacing ourselves and preparing for the upcoming milestones. In a “darkest before the dawn” sort of way.

Yeah, it is T-minus 4 weeks until (probably) a very quiet Christmas. And for the first time in our lives, we will not be physically going to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. No holiday parties. No carols swimming in church acoustics. We know the rationale is solid, but it is still a bombshell.

We’re also biding our time until COVID-19 vaccines will be available for us…and wondering how much darker things will get before then.

We’re waiting on doctor’s visits. 

We’re waiting to finalize our Battle Plan. 

We’re waiting to see our family again. 

We’re waiting on a whole lot of things. 

As a family of doers, we’re trying to find joy in anticipating one December birthday and practicing being hopeful that Project Waterbear will have a happy ending.

this has been a tedtalk.

I guess that's how these days are hitting us: hope and then not so much, haha.

PSA: Ted wishes to note that he wrote his TedTalk in a slowly darkening room, while hungry, with dismal news flashing across the TV in front of him. He is now fed. Things are better.