The inference in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot is that life has no meaning and is full of suffering.

Waiting for a conception/parenthood can be fraught with suffering but contrary to the play is full of meaning. For what can be more meaningful than creating the next generation and investing heart and soul in raising a productive member of society?

Waiting. What a concept. How does one develop a relationship with time that values every moment as an opportunity to swim, even though upstream, rather than sink into despair? How can you convert the experience of every day seeming like a month and every month seem like a year into precious opportunities to do your life in a way that feels fertile?

What can you “give birth to” and nurture? For some it might be a puppy or a poem; for others creating a recipe for soup to warm the inner spirit. The key, it seems, is to hold the fact that you will be looking back on this challenge someday. It’s asking a lot to frame things in this simple, moment-to-moment way, but if the alternative is despair, do you want to expend the enormous energy it takes to live in that lane?

The question, at least to my way of thinking is How does one cope with the month-long no man’s land between attempts to hit the jackpot?

Not easily, for sure, but not impossibly either. The question underlying that question is How does one make meaning out of this brand of suffering?

Here are some reframes that have emerged from patients in my 40+ years in doing this work.

The wait has allowed me (us) to:

  • Finish a degree
  • Buy and fix up our home
  • Learn the meaning of patience
  • Deepen our relationship
  • Deal with negative emotions
  • Deal with intrusive people
  • Learn to reverse the physiology of stress as often as possible
  • Remember and fortify inner strength
  • Learn to claim and reclaim control
  • Smooth the many predictable and unpredictable bumps in the road by developing awareness of, fortifying, and learning to trust my (our) emotional shock absorbers

One former patient summed it up this way: If we didn’t have to wait, we wouldn’t now have this (our perfect) child.

I like to frame the path to navigating this journey as the capacity to organize thinking around what I call The 3 ‘A’s:

Awareness*Acceptance*Adaptation

*Awareness is painful; guaranteed to create shock and unrest. As they say, DeNile is more than a river in Egypt.
*Acceptance is never a straight line. It’s normal to rail against it, but it is what ultimately allows for…
*Adaptation. This is your ticket to parenthood, whether by the physical rigors of medical
solutions or the emotional gymnastics that solidify the ‘landing’ – no matter the path.

So how will you rearrange your brain cells to redefine waiting?

Helen Adrienne, LCSW, BCD
helen@helenadrienne.com