Our Greatest Adventure Yet

The Lesson Learned

It may seem obvious, given the title I gave this blog, but I still have to remind myself nearly every day that life really is about the journey. If you can’t find happiness along the way, you're doing it wrong.

The Journey

I have been writing this piece since 2017, and I don’t think it’ll ever be complete. I revisit it every year or so to read it, add to it, and reminisce about the life that Alex and I have been building. I like to think that I’ll continue writing it well into my centenarian years, capturing our adventures for decades to come.

I won’t share our entire journey because not everything belongs on the internet. Here are a few excerpts.

Ours is a story of patience.

We were 16, and we met while he was home from boarding school for the weekend. Fast forward a couple of decades, a cross-country long-distance relationship, a few moves, one near-death proposal incident, and two dogs later…

We were 37, and after seven failed attempts to have a baby, we decided it was finally time to move on. 

The day after we spoke with a surrogacy agency and began making plans for a new future, we learned the universe had other plans. 

After nearly four years of trying, we saw two pink lines. 

Some might call it a miracle. A surprise. A gift. We’ll call her our greatest adventure yet when she arrives this summer.

If you ask me (and most people I know who have been on this journey), the hardest part has not been the wild hormones or the endless appointments or even the multiple daily injections. It’s the waiting. Waiting for results, for approvals, for medications, for answers, for luck. It’s the brutal understanding that often the only thing you can do is wait and also that waiting is often the only thing that makes it worse (time is not on my 38-year-old side). 

If there is one thing this journey has taught me, it is this: You cannot wait for happiness. So we’ve prioritized it along the way — right alongside the grief and heartbreak and anger and exhaustion and all the waiting — because otherwise we may not have found it at all.

Ours is a story of patience. It is also a story of happiness.

Ours is a story still unfolding, still unforeseen. 

But it is, has been, and will always be about the journey.