The waiting room

Once again inspired by luna to write a post. The wait, and particularly issues around setting up a nursery during the wait, is something that I've planned to write about, and I love the conversation that got going over at luna's blog.

We didn't prepare anything during our wait. Our agency actually does NOT encourage their waiting families to prepare anything, though of course everyone decides for themselves and I know that some people do prepare nurseries (as evidenced by the pictures of the baby room in some of the example profiles we looked at before preparing our own). We live in an apartment - not small by NYC standards, but certainly not big enough that you could possibly avoid any part of it. So there would be no way to not see a set up nursery had we decided to convert it during our wait. I actually couldn't have anything "baby" in sight. My parents went shopping as soon as they heard we were going to adopt, and bought onesies, pacifiers and other small things. I never looked at that bag of stuff, which they kept in their house. They sent us a onesie after a vacation in February. I immediately hid it away. (And as a Christmas gift last year, they gave our future baby a teddy bear. I hid that away so well that we still can't find it!!)

When we went to the information session at our agency about a year ago, I remember one of the social workers saying, "You WILL be parents at the end of this process. It's 100% sure." That blew me away. After four years of trying to become parents, it seemed unreal that there could be any absolutes. Any guarantees.

But...

After we had finished all of the paperwork and had officially entered the waiting period, I still didn't feel like it would ever actually happen. I would tell my husband this frequently. He would talk about the future with all of the "if we have the baby by then...." and I couldn't do it. I couldn't take that leap. I really never felt 100% sure. I felt like there would be some reason that we wouldn't be parents, even with our 100% "guarantee". We would be the exception.

Because, after all, I'm still an infertile woman. And this is part of what my infertility has meant for me - there are no absolutes, there are no guarantees, nothing will be as you ever expected it, reduce/change/get rid of your expectations, give up what you always took for granted.

So, given that I thought we'd never become parents, why have a baby's room? So we never set anything up, never bought anything. (Full disclosure: because I am a planner by nature, I did research different gear and save what we decided we wanted on a registry, which I never showed to anyone.)

What is now our baby's room was our "room where we put all the crap that we don't have anywhere else to put". I had wanted to convert it into a yoga/meditation space during our wait. I got as far as clearing some stuff out and having room for my yoga mat, and put some candles in there.

And then we got the call. What I thought would never happen happened. Again, nothing will ever be as I expect it. And we went shopping. And the super in our building painted the room. Voila! Baby's room done. I am so glad we did it this way. At one point I had considered painting the room during the wait. Seeing the room painted now, I'm glad we didn't get that far. I don't think I could have even handled seeing the bright green of the walls while we were waiting.

Love, love, love the idea of gathering books for the baby during the wait. I have gazillions of children's books around the house because I'm an elementary teacher and can rarely pass up buying a good picture book (Skippyjon Jones is a favorite of mine and my students!). Now that I have an actual publicized registry, I would say about half the items on it are books.

Our baby shower is on Saturday. Unbelievable. Somebody pinch me...