When Waiting Makes You Want to Chew Your Own Arm Off

The Glorious Table is happy to welcome Melanie Dale to the table, with an excerpt from her new book It’s Not Fair: Learning to Love the Life You Didn’t Choose (Zondervan, 2016) “about us sitting down together in our shared mess, taking a deep breath, gripping hands, looking the hard stuff in its beady little eyeballs, and bahahahaaing at it.”

Waiting can be like a ride at Universal Studios, where you stand in line for an hour and see the door up ahead. You finally make it to the door and think, “This is it,” only to discover that it just leads you into another room filled with more lines. Life can feel like one holding tank after another.

Are you waiting for a degree or a job or a spouse or a child or a cure? Waiting is the worst. When I was dealing with infertility, every day felt like forever. I lived month by month. When I was shooting up with some new drug or having an ultrasound or asking the doctors hundreds of questions or enjoying the thrill of a nurse plunging a needle into my vein again and again, I was okay. Those parts were better because I felt proactive. I was doing my part, accomplishing the thing, making it happen.

But the in-between parts — waiting for the time for more testing, waiting to see if all of it worked — that was pure torture. I drove myself mad with the not knowing. Same with our adoptions. When I was in full-on paperwork mode, I was a fingerprinting, notarizing, apostilling fiend. I felt in charge. I mean, as in charge as you can feel during these things. But once that stack of papers shipped off to other hands, all we could do was wait — on social workers and lawyers and courts.

The waiting can make you feel like you want to chew your own arm off. Waiting for results, waiting for people, waiting for the phone call. If only I could get pregnant… If only I could keep this baby… If only the adoption would go through… I’ve spent years, maybe a whole decade, iffing my life away.

What I’ve learned is to flip my whole perspective and exchange the ifs for the nows. As you’ve probably been told bajillions of times, life is about the bleeping journey, and if we if it away, we miss it.

So even now, in the waiting, in the sucking, in the agony of open wounds and unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams, how do you find joy? How do you savor the smell of a rose even as its thorns bite your flesh?

You count and catalog the gratitude, hunt it down, capture and write it and collage it on a wall. You aggressively seek the good amidst the bad and give thanks, give it as an act of defiance against circumstances seeking your demise. Speak the words, and don’t worry if your heart takes a while to catch up. Thank you for the coffee. Thank you for the heat in the car warming your icy fingers. You watch a movie and let yourself laugh. Something absurd, something ridiculous, and you let your muscles remember laughter.

And you eat a meal with a friend. Your safe person. If you don’t have one, set a place across from yours at the table and ask God to fill it. Pray a brave prayer for future friendship and pay attention for someone in your life to move toward you. You eat a meal with someone and you savor the moments of camaraderie. And it might be exhausting to do it often, so maybe just once, just on occasion, you let yourself feel connected to someone over food.

My friend Fabiola gave such great advice one time when one of our adoptions was falling through, and we were spinning and reeling and trying to figure out what to do. She said to use the scented lotion in the bottom drawer. The special yummy lotion that someone gives as a gift that’s too nice and you don’t want to waste it on the everyday. Use it. Pull it out of the drawer and put it on your counter and use it now, in the pit.

Light the candle that’s huge and expensive that you don’t want to waste. You aren’t wasting it if it’s making your life brighter during a dark time. Buy a cake just because life is worth celebrating. Go out and take a night off from talking about The Thing.

[Tweet “Be gloriously and ridiculously yourself. Dare to hope in the present, in all its squishy mess.”] Incomplete and messy with lots of question marks. You write down what you know.

You write down what you don’t know. You pay attention and record these feelings, because so often we wait for everything to be better before we make a record. We fill a baby book or a wedding album or a vacation scrapbook, but these are the moments, this is the life, your now life, and you are living it and it’s worthy of a book all its own. As Mr. Leezak says in Just Married, “You never see the hard days in a photo album… but those are the ones that get you from one happy snapshot to the next.”

No need to wait for the perfect memories. These are the memories you have right now, and they are worthy and lovely even in their painfulness and horribleness. Don’t wait to start living until everything is okay and you’re a real boy, Pinocchio. Live now as a creaky wooden doll person.

So maybe as you’re dealing with a big bad, maybe there’s something you should just do anyway even if the timing stinks and you don’t know what tomorrow will hold. Maybe you need to grab a night at the improv theater or serve at the food bank or invite the friend over right in the middle of the mess. Or crack open the yummy lotion. Discover the gooey center of a life still baking in the oven.

Are you waiting for healing? For a next step? It’s agony, isn’t it? Every single day, fight to find the wins. Search them out amidst the nothingness. Where are the wins?

I spent twelve years building my family, and each day felt like an eternity as the clock ticked and the needles stabbed and the paperwork expired. And now that we’re together, we count the wins of healing and coping. Whatever you’re waiting on, however long you’ve been waiting, count the wins. Find the moments to savor, when the longing falls away and it’s just you with the wind against your skin. A steaming cup of coffee. The sparkling eyes of a stranger who smiles at you.

There’s the pain of waiting and there’s the pain of enduring, for some things have no end. You wait and wait and that is near unbearable, but the enduring… that takes practice, getting up every day knowing that this, too, will be hard. Both in the waiting and in the enduring, you have to find joy. And for the enduring, especially, because there is no green pasture on the other side, only the joy to be dug up in your own yard.

The longing is always there, like the pain in my ovary, but counting the wins reminds us of the beauty in the journey toward wholeness. We may never find wholeness this side of heaven, but we may find whole moments of joy.

Melanie Dale is a minivan mama and total weirdo who stinks at small talk. Her laugh is a combination honk-snort, and it’s so bad that people have moved away from her in the movie theater. She adores sci-fi and superheroes and is terrified of Pinterest. Author of Women Are Scary: The Totally Awkward Adventure of Finding Mom Friends and It’s Not Fair: Learning to Love the Life You Didn’t Choose, she’s also a contributor for Coffee+Crumbs and an advocate for Children’s HopeChest. Her writing has been featured on Parenting.com, Scary Mommy, Working Mother Magazine, Deadspin’s Adequate Man, Ann Voskamp’s A Holy Experience, and Today’s Christian Woman, and she’s a panelist for MomsEveryday TV. Living in the Atlanta area, she enjoys recording her podcast, Lighten Up with Melanie Dale, and blogging at Unexpected.org.

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