My love for my dear friend Schelle is well recorded. She is a great friend, one of the best I’ve ever and probably will ever know, and one of the things that makes her so valuable is her ability to tell you the stuff that hurts to hear. She is a wise and learned counselor.
But every once and a while I want to strangle her. Mainly because the truth sometimes hurts and I hate to be wrong, but also when I just don’t agree with her about something and she’s so convinced of her correctness she’s like a dog with a bone. Plus, she loves it when steam starts to come out of my ears.
Lately we’ve been going back and forth about the house hunt. I’m so frustrated with it that it moves me to tears, and she keeps saying that I should just enjoy the ride. Now, Schelle loves real estate. She’s moved around a bunch too and knows all about the joys and humiliations involved in the house buying process, but she also loves to look at houses for the fun of it and search house prices on the internet just to see what her childhood home would be worth now if her parents hadn’t sold.
Meanwhile, I see this as the most necessary of evils. The last, hoop-jumping, red-tape-cutting gauntlet that is separating me from the culmination of 28 years of hopes and dreams. In my entire life I have never been settled anywhere for more than 2 years. And before marriage it was 1 year. Even when we finally settled into the house I would live in for seven years, it was always a different school every year, a different church, another different church, another different school and another different school and another different school, all with a different group of kids, until I left home at 16 and started a period of even more transience.
I am not rational about this house. This is not just a shelter to me, this is roots and stability and home and family. This is finally putting the rootless wandering of my growing up behind me and entering the grown up world. This is moving towards the family I want so much and cannot have.
When Schelle tells me to enjoy the ride, I don’t think she’s wrong. She says that enjoying the ride is what we’re all here to do and I completely agree with her. But this cuts too deep for me. I understand that for most people house hunting is stressful but fun, a time to dream. But most feel the same way about pregnancy. Most people get to have their kids when they want them, they get to deal with symptoms and labor pains and get a wonderful person out of the bargain, I don’t.
To me, the issues are one and the same. This house means so much to me, it’s become a part of my infertilty. It’s a grandiose symbol of the home and life I want and can’t achieve. I have no control over whether or not children come, but I should be able to control this, and once again, I can’t.
Infertility is a ride I can’t enjoy, and so is this.