Waiting

Fried Chicken & Bud Light on Christmas Eve, Winter Solstice, and Advent | No. 016

Note: If you’re new here, I usually write about motherhood, adoption, foster care, and parenting. I’m taking a few months to pause from these topics and write about other things while I work on an intensive project coming in 2025!

Children’s author Mo Willems has a book in his popular Elephant & Piggie series titled Waiting is Not Easy!* In the book, Piggie has a surprise he wants to show his elephant best friend, Gerald. Gerald really, really, really wants to see it. Piggie says he will have to wait. Gerald doesn’t want to wait. Gerald feels upset that he has to wait and is over. it. And eventually decides he doesn’t want anything to do with the surprise.

After a day of waiting for Piggie’s surprise, Gerald feels anxious, upset, and annoyed and finally wails at Piggie, “We have waited and waited and waited and waited! And for WHAT?”

Piggie calmly assures him the surprise is coming, but he can’t see it just yet. At the end of the day (spoiler alert), Piggie shows Gerald a beautiful night sky full of stars. Gerald finally agrees the spectacular view was worth the wait.

Photo by Benjaminrobyn Jespersen on Unsplash

This week last year, we were in the final days of waiting for our older kids’ Adoption Day. We had known them for just over 20 months before the adoption was official. They had waited much longer than that for permanency: 2,206 days (6+ years) in the foster care system, to be exact. They walked a long, hard, traumatizing road of waiting. My husband and I had signed the papers, attended the meetings, scheduled the dates, and prepared special activities for the week. We were waiting to become a court-official family forever.

In the Christian church world, it’s Advent season. Advent begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and it’s the waiting season—the waiting and preparation for Christmas. In our house, we celebrate every night of Advent with a candle lighting, a short devotional, and the kids opening an Advent calendar with little gifts (this year’s theme is animal socks for Jaxsin and cat and holiday socks for Jordyn; Grace just chews on her socks, so she’s not getting any this year). We wait for Christmas and celebrate what each of the four candles in the Advent wreath represents: hope, peace, joy, and love.

Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

This month last year, I was 4 months pregnant with Grace. I was always awaiting the next appointment, the gender reveal, the baby showers, the next strange symptom or craving, her evolving size and movements, and all the coming days that would get us closer to meeting our new baby. I was scared of anything bad happening to this baby before I got to meet her, and I was also a nervous wreck thinking about the whole giving birth part of the deal. But, we were surrounded by people who had nothing but pure joy and excitement for this baby we were about to add to our family. One thing was definitely true: we were waiting to meet the tiny human we already loved so much.

Sometimes, the waiting is not in anticipation of a good thing. Eight years ago this month, we were waiting to find out the severity of my dad’s new diagnosis of a rare cancer called multiple myeloma. For Christmas Eve dinner that year, just two weeks after my dad’s initial diagnosis, any dinner plans we had fell through. So-and-so was sick, someone else was traveling, someone was stressed to high heaven, and someone, of course, now had cancer; so, in a nutshell, nobody ended up cooking Christmas Eve dinner.

That’s how my husband and I, along with my mom, dad, and brother, ended up eating fried chicken and drinking Bud Light at a dive bar on Christmas Eve (Sud’s Hut, for any Billings readers)*. It wasn’t a happy time of waiting, but my husband remembers the dinner with some degree of endearment. The waiting wasn’t easy, and we were in shock at receiving and anticipating more bad news, but we waited together.* We were waiting in love and solidarity.

Sud’s Hut in Billings closed in 2018, two years after our Christmas Eve dinner.

Piggie and Gerald are characters in young readers’ picture books, so their waiting story ends with a happy surprise. Life outside of children’s books doesn’t always reward our waiting. Sometimes, it works out, and a starry sky is our reward for our journey: a forever family, Christmas, and a new baby. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out so well: a cancer diagnosis and a lifetime of uncertainty. Either way, Piggie and Gerald’s lesson of Waiting is Not Easy is always true, whether the story ends how we want it to or not.

So, here we are in this season of waiting. This month seems to bring us to a place of waiting again and again. This Saturday, December 21st, is the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. Author Tanya Markul said of this day,

The Winter Solstice

The shortest day

and the longest night.

A reminder that dark times

give birth to astonishing light.

Most of us are waiting for something right now: a decision, a phone call, a diagnosis, a job, a family shift, a new season, something new to appear within ourselves. We wait in the midst of darkness in love, in anticipation, and hold each other the best we can through it all, waiting for the light.

Photo by Jarl Schmidt on Unsplash

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*You can click the link, gather your young kiddos, and listen to Waiting is Not Easy! by Mo Willems on YouTube.

*My family would disagree that Sud’s Hut was a dive bar. I think it was, but that feeling doesn’t mean I didn’t like it, guys.

*My dad still has multiple myeloma eight years later, but by the grace of God, the gift of medical advances, and others’ support (here’s to you, Mom), he’s currently stable and living life alongside us.

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