Is There Anything Worse Than Waiting?

I’m not really big into roller coaster rides, but there is one particular ride at Lagoon Amusement Park in Utah that I really enjoy. It’s not really a roller coaster since it doesn’t follow a track, but it sure is thrilling, along with the waiting.

First, they strap you into your seat and raise you high high high into the air. Getting raised up and up and up and watching the people on the ground getting smaller and smaller and smaller is exciting because we all know what soon will be happening. Other than the seat you are sitting on and the bars holding you firmly in place, you have nothing else around you. Your feet dangle lazily beneath you without a floor to rest them on.

The concept of the ride is simple. You free fall until you get near the ground, then you bounce back up like a rubber band, then down, and the ride is over. The fall is scary, yes, but it’s not the scariest part. What gets you the most is the WAIT! Once you are at the top, sitting 20 stories up or so, you just sit there. You know you’re in for a crazy ride, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. There’s no clock. There’s no countdown. There’s nothing but time to wait until suddenly, without any notice at all, your ride has begun.

When my wife and I started on our journey to adoption the first time, we didn’t know just how similar our life would be to that ride. Even though the paperwork was horrible, tedious pain, it was exciting to know we were actually working on something that would bring us closer to parenthood. Once we finished our home study and papers, though, we sat there dangling. Sure, we worked on networking and we spread the word the very best we could, but for the most part, we were stuck wondering how long it would take for our ride to really start.

After we had been waiting for what felt to us like a century, my wife jumped on the adoption agency website and started browsing through the different couples just to see when our profile would pop up. We were way down the list of couples and it seemed like it would take another century before anyone even noticed we were there.

So there we sat without a clock, without a countdown, without anyway of knowing how long we would have to sit and dangle our legs. Suddenly, when we were on our way to buy a new frame for our bed, my wife’s phone beeped to let her know she had an email. She checked the email, and our life has never been the same since.

The wait was horrible. The wait was torture. The ride was just as intense. Afterward, though, we got to where we are now with a wonderful feeling of triumph and joy. My heart no longer has trouble regulating itself, and my life isn’t bouncing up and down the way it did in the beginning. What a crazy and wonderful ride it was, even though we had to go through that horrendous waiting period.