Patients

Thing I thought I’d never say: We put in a bid on the house. Sadly, so did someone else. So, now we wait. We’re up to the highest bid we’re comfortable with, and there’s nothing to do but wait for a call.

People prepared me for all sorts of things about attempting to buy a home. The main focus seemed to be on accepting the fact that you may not get the house you want. We may not get this house. I can live with that. There will be other houses. There, in fact, are other houses, that would work just as well for our family. They just didn’t speak to me like the crazy tile in this house. But we do have a next choice if this one doesn’t pan out.

What no one prepared me for was the horror of waiting. Patience is not my strongest suit, but it isn’t my weakest, either. I’m accustomed to waiting. This particular waiting just feels terrible. I’ve done all that I can, and I have no way to know the probability of it working out in my favor until someone calls with our fate.

This kind of waiting is not outside my realm of experience; it just conjures up the worst of it. Big Brother had what turned out to be pyloric stenosis as an infant, but until they found it, he was just vomiting all the time and losing weight, and I was just trying to figure out how to keep any milk in him. Little Brother got a staph infection at ten days old, but it didn’t present typically and so there were a lot of cultures to rule out possibilities while we sat in the hospital. My father had what turned out to be a stroke, which also didn’t present typically, on his 65th birthday and once we got to the ER, not only was there nothing we could do, but I was told to go home because I was pregnant.

Obviously, this is not as bad as that. I’m not waiting to find out if someone I love might be permanently damaged or die. I just think that this particular type of waiting, where I have no control over the outcome and no options to change it once it comes, has brought up some trauma I didn’t realize I hadn’t dealt with. Today, I’m hugging all my boys a little tighter. I’m also still really hoping we get this weird little house.