The Waiting Game Sucks, Let's Play Hungry Hungry Hippos

I've had three babies without drugs. After I had Ava, I marveled how someone could experience so much pain and still live. I know physical pain. I've heard of ignorant or perhaps even just plain insensitive people, telling adoptive mothers something like, "well, you did it the easy way!!" in the name of jest or exclusion or just because sometimes people don't know how to respond to something they don't understand. For the record, this gestation is no easier. The rollercoaster that is adoption is like all the physical pain of labor and birth spread out over the course of an adoption process and transformed into emotional pain. Family planning, the process of bringing a child into your family, is rife with ways to break your heart no matter how that child comes to you. It is also filled with eventual joy of course. But for the international adoptive parent there is no feeling the baby kick. There are no sonograms, or hearing the heart beat. These are replaced instead with waiting and wondering. And then someday, a phone call. A picture. A name. Magic...
But for now, we wait.