Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: WAIT (05/21/20)
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TITLE: Easier Said Than Done | Previous Challenge Entry
By Tammy Ortung
05/27/20 -
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“Lord, why?” she cried. “Why haven’t you given me a child of my own?”
“Wait,” she heard from a still, small voice.
Piper knew many women struggled with getting pregnant after being on the pill, so at first she hadn’t been concerned. Yet when she hadn’t conceived after two years, she made an appointment.
The doctor found a large cyst and scheduled an ultrasound. Piper’s hopes plummeted when told she had endometriosis. She had laparoscopic surgery and the fertility doctor scheduled an intrauterine insemination, which required hormone shots seven days prior to the procedure.
Neither she nor her husband, Jack, knew what they were doing.
About halfway through the hormone regiment, they went to the bedroom for her nightly shot. She took off her pants and lay face down on the bed, dreading what was to come. She didn’t know if it was because she absolutely hated shots, or because the insertion area was really tender from the previous injections, or because the hormones were already raging through her system—but when Jack gave her the shot that night, she went berserk.
“Ooouuuch!” she yelled, “Could you be any rougher?”
“Piper, I was as gentle as possible.”
“No, you weren’t! You did that on purpose!” she continued to shout.
“What are you talking about?” Jack asked. “This is getting stupid.”
“But …”
“No,” he said, raising his voice now. “This is ridiculous.”
Piper nervously anticipated those nightly shots. She imagined the torture was worse than getting all her teeth pulled without Novocain.
Finally, the doctor performed the procedure and they waited. Two weeks later she cried when her monthly arrived.
“Why Lord?” she asked again.
“Wait,” He said patiently. “Trust me. I have plans to prosper you and not harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.”
Trust? Piper thought. Easier said than done. She’d always had trouble waiting on God’s timing.
She scheduled another fertility appointment. After explaining her limited options, the doctor recommended In Vitro. Piper wasn’t sure what to do. The idea of enduring those hormone shots for over a month made her cringe. Plus, it cost ten thousand dollars with no guarantees.
“Could we could get pregnant without doing In Vitro?” she asked.
“Maybe, but yours absorbed your right ovary and is considered Stage 4. Statistically you only have about a twenty percent chance.”
Piper was thoughtful as she left the doctor’s office. She continued to pray. She had others pray. After all, birth control pills were ninety-eight percent effective and people got pregnant all the time on that two percent chance. She figured the odds were in her favor at twenty percent.
She prayed for years, but God didn’t answer. She felt cursed. Useless. Empty, like a stiff, lifeless mannequin. And when she entered her late thirties—as the gears in her biological clock started to rust—she wondered precisely what she was waiting on.
One evening, the telephone rang. It was Kelly, Jack’s oldest daughter. She was sobbing.
“What’s wrong?” Piper asked.
Kelly had always been one to keep her feelings inside, but at fifteen she starting calling almost every night bawling. This went on for six months. She was unhappy for a variety of reasons, but most pointed toward her mother’s inability to love her the way she needed to be loved. “Why does she hate me so much?” Kelly said more than once.
Piper’s heart broke a little each time she called, completely shattering when Kelly started hyperventilating on the other end of the phone. Piper worried she might do something drastic.
Eventually, they talked Kelly into moving in with them. Surprisingly, there were only a few growing pains as they struggled to find their new normal. One year led to five, and Piper grew to love Kelly as much as she imagined a mother who birthed a child could cherish another human being.
Though her life didn’t turn out the way she had envisioned—five grandkids later—Piper finally realized this was what she’d been waiting for all those years. God had blessed her with a unique kind of motherhood. While she hadn’t given birth to Kelly, she’d met a kindred spirit—almost as if nurture had overcome nature.
And each night before falling into a peaceful slumber, Piper prayed, “Thank you, Lord, I’m so thankful I waited.”
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