Acceptance Isn't Giving Up

There’s a version of forty I had for myself for long time without realizing it. She lived in a house with a husband, maybe a child or two, a life that looked a certain way; the way lives are “supposed” to look when you’ve done everything right, worked hard, stayed faithful, kept showing up. If you were to tell me 10 years ago that I still wouldn’t have that by 40, I wouldn’t have believed it. There was so much time…anything could happen.

Well, a lot did happen, but not that.

What was there instead: on camera with a fertility doctor talking about saving my eggs because my reserve was low. Here I was, making family planning decisions without the family. My numbers were lower than expected. Not catastrophic, but enough that the window I’d assumed was wide open was, in fact, already narrowed. This idea of time, time to wait for someone, seemed no longer available.

After going through many different emotions, I made the decision to follow through with egg freezing. I may never need them, or I may, but I will be able to create an option when the time comes. But I want to be honest about what that was like emotionally, because no one talks about the part that isn’t logistical.

It wasn’t grief about the future. It was grief about the story I’d been quietly telling myself. That story where things would unfold in order eventually and there was still plenty of time.

Sitting with a lower-than-expected number means sitting with the reality that your body has its own timeline, and it doesn’t negotiate. While the “biological clock” isn’t news to me, I’ve always been a very healthy person. So to hear that I have lower than average, meant I needed to release a future that was never promised, only assumed.

That’s kind of grief is difficult to explain without sounding like you’re mourning something you never had or sounding hopeless.

But here’s what I didn’t expect: underneath the grief was relief.

The relief no one warns you about

Once I made the decision, once the question stopped being hypothetical and became something I had actually addressed, I felt a weight lifting off my shoulders. The waiting was over. The “maybe someday” had become an action. And the holding pattern I didn’t even know I was in dissolved.

Acceptance did that. Not resignation, acceptance. There’s a meaningful difference.

Resignation says: I give up. This is not what I wanted and I’m choosing to be done wanting it.

Acceptance says: This is what is true right now. I can stop fighting it, stop bargaining with it, stop organizing my life around the version of this that was never guaranteed. I can open my hands.

What the open hands have found

I am learning Spanish. Seriously, not the “I downloaded an app” Spanish, but committed, reading, writing, working with a tutor kind of Spanish. This is something I have always wanted and now I am planning a relocation around it. TBD.

I’ve been building toward this for years; full independent licensure. Remote work that travels with me. A life that doesn’t require me to be in one place to be whole. This is what happens when you stop defending the life you thought you were supposed to have. You notice the life that’s actually available to you and it turns out to be extraordinary.

What I believe about all of it

I am a woman of deep faith. And my faith has taught me that slowly, sometimes painfully, very painfully, the life God has for me is not necessarily the life I designed for myself.

Surrender is not failure. That the open-handed posture is not weakness but wisdom. That beauty, the plans, the vision, don’t always arrive on the schedule you wrote.

The woman I am at forty doesn’t look like the woman I imagined.

She is more interesting.

She is more honest.

She is sitting with a cup of coffee, conjugating irregular verbs, and she is not waiting anymore for her life to start.

Her life started. It just looked different than expected.

And that, all of it, the grief and the relief and the open hands and the Spanish and the plane tickets and the faith that something good is ahead, that is what acceptance actually means.

It means you stop arguing with reality long enough to see what’s real.

And what’s real is often, if you’ll let it be, better than enough.

Till Next Time,

Kristine