Stuck

Sometimes I feel like we are little people, stuck under this HUGE tractor wheel as we wait to become parents. Each little thing we do is a giant effort on our part, but the exertion only moves the wheel a tiny little bit. The wheel is an okay place to be, most of the time. All our primary needs are met, we have lots of friends and family that visit us at the wheel, and we manage to keep ourselves busy. But occasionally it's dark and cloudy under the wheel. I long for the day when we finally push enough and the thing moves out of our way...when we can live a more "normal" life like what we had imagined for ourselves back when we first started this journey into adulthood. I know parenthood will not be some perfect utopia, free of problems and stress...but the stress that comes with becoming a parent is actually stress I long for, as crazy as that may seem to anyone already living it.

For the moment, I am trying hard to focus on being exactly where I am. Even though that's much easier said than done, keeping that goal in mind does make me feel less worried about what's coming in the future or what's happened in the past. Somehow it makes me less likely to get depressed or bogged down with my own desires...with my own pursuit of happiness, so to speak. That exact thought has been an underlying theme in a book I recently read called Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Some parts of the book were better than others, but that one thread has helped me to refocus my attention to where we are, rather than where we long to be, and I think that's a good thing.

For the nuts and bolts part of it, we are still waiting to enter the pool. These things always take more time than I expect them to...it's always something that seems to put us on hold a little while longer. In this case we have a small amount of money we need to come up with--that part should happen in the next week or so. But the bigger issue is that we got our adoption book back and there is a binding issue. The book looks fabulous, but because of the way it's bound, some of the text is cut off the tiniest little bit where the edges of the book meet. It's almost not enough to worry about, because you can still pretty much read what the journaling says, but being the perfectionist I am, I'd really like to at least see if this can be fixed. The book looked great in the previews, and I checked and quadruple checked for any issues like this. We paid a fair amount of money for the two copies of our book, so we're going to see if there is any way they can be reprinted with modifications to make up for the binding. I am frustrated, but again, trying to just take it all one day at a time!