Staggering

I once heard that you will never be asked to bear more than you can handle. Now, I know I'm a strong woman. I'm stubborn and strong-willed and optimistic and determined and driven. And TH is a strong man. He helped guide his family through their refugee experience. He lied about his age and worked multiple jobs when he was 14 to help pay their bills. He's faced more adversity and discriminatory hate than many will ever know. He's a fighter. A dogged fighter. Together, we make an incredible team. We have faced challenges, scary, daunting, life-altering challenges, together with humor and faith.

And right now, we're staggering.

On the baby front, it gets hard to hear every new BFP from our friends and family. We never begrudge the person their fortune. Many have worked long and hard and been patient beyond imagination for their blessing, and they deserve their BFP without a doubt or hard feeling in mind. But we are running out of friend who AREN'T pregnant. And it gets hard, wanting something for yourself, working for it, believing that you are doing everything right, believing that you deserve it, only to have everyone around you get it, those who worked for it, those who didn't, and those who didn't even want it. It both consumes our thoughts and poisons them. Even when you try not to think about something, when you try to distract yourself, it's there, floating at the edge of your mind, the thing you are running from, the thing you are ignoring. It's there, and we can't escape it. And it's getting heavier every day.

But there's life outside of baby-making. There's our jobs. I've worked overtime and weekends the past two weeks, and there is no end in sight for this crush of work. I only see it getting worse. There are a lot of reasons for this--being short staffed, the economic sl0w down impacting our staffing resources, etc., but that doesn't change the reality that I've been running at sprint pace for longer than sprint distance. TH's job is the same--one of the drawbacks of climbing the management ladder so quickly is that he's now managing others while still having to take care of his previous responsibilities as well. Until next May at least (official promotion time), he's stuck doing two jobs. So our jobs, too, are getting heavier every day.

And then there's our family. TH's mom has been sick for going on a year now. Mentally and physically sick. There was a point at which she was improving, but she has taken a drastic turn for the worse in the last two weeks. I won't get into the family dynamics of TH's family here--suffice it to say he is the man everyone in his family turns to for the answer to every problem. Today it came to a head--things got so bad that his dad took his mom to the hospital, the doctors all said she needed to be admitted immediately, she refused. His dad called TH to fix it. TH was on the phone with his mom for 45 minutes (while at work mind you), begging and pleading with her, crying, telling her to admit herself for him, for her husband, for her children's sake. She refused and the decision was made to get a court order allowing all future medical decisions to be made by TH' dad. TH left work, on his way up to Dallas to help take care of it all, when he got the call that she had finally agreed.

I know that things could always get worse. I know that people have faced far greater challenges than these. I know that we have the strength to weather these storms. But we're no longer defiantly standing up to the brunt of the storm, no longer shouting into the face of our challenges. We are turning our backs to the stinging rain, the lightening, the wind, and hunkering down against its anger, just surviving until the storm passes.

It's not that we can't bear the load that has been given to us. It's just that it's getting so very heavy, and we're getting so very tired.