On waiting:

(from Merriam-Webster)

Wait (verb, transitive) 1.to stay in place in expectation of 2.to serve, as a waiter 3.to delay serving

(verb, intransitive) 1.to remain stationary in readiness or expectation, to pause for another to catch up 2.to look forward expectantly, to hold back expectantly 3.to serve at meals 4.to be ready and available, to remain temporarily neglected or unrealized

(noun)A hidden or concealed position, a state or attitude of watchfulness and expectancy

Waiting seems to have taken the lead for me these days.... My own pod, as the name of this blog might suggest, is currently without pea. At this moment, I am waiting for another week or so (9 days, not that I'm counting) to pass before I can pee on a stick and hope for a result that is reliable, whether it's positive or negative. If it's negative, I will commence waiting again for my period to end, at which point I will again be waiting to ovulate and start the game over.

All of this after both waiting for my sweetheart to feel he was ready to start trying and waiting, then, for the insurance rider to kick in so we could begin this journey.

I'm more than a little sick of waiting.

So I've been thinking a lot about waiting, and anticipation (both of things desired and not). I am struck by the "official" definitions of wait, of the meanings seeming to be at odds with each other, and yet all coming down to the same feeling. To look forward, to hold back, to be hidden and watchful, to be ready and available... There is so much emotion tangled up in the waiting when one is trying to conceive. You don't dare to hope, and hope anyway; you want to scream during the dreaded "Two Week Wait" because time isn't moving fast enough, and you're waiting for any sign of your period starting... and yet you don't want to see those signs, because it will mean even more waiting.

I grew up in a family that was (and is, mostly) Roman Catholic, more or less. The back of my mind swirls with half-formed notions of waiting as a gift, the act of waiting as something to be treasured and savored. Whether those thoughts are my own family's reworking of Catholic doctrine-- my parents quietly disregarded some of the things they felt the church was flat-out wrong about-- or my childhood brain's interpretation of what I was hearing, I really can't say. I was left with a suspicion that the adults in my life were trying to find a way of explaining that there is no getting around waiting, and that I might as well get used to it. And maybe try to see it in a different light, so it would be easier to bear.

And now I'm doing what I've always done while waiting for time to pass (in itself a funny thought, as time is always passing, and it's pretty silly to get impatient as we've only got so much of it in the course of our lives). I read. More recently, in the last 10-12 years, I also sew... but mostly I read. Sometimes to distract myself-- fiction, sci-fi, books for "young adults"-- but these days, to fill my brain with as much information as possible.