The Problem with Nesting

So, I’m eight months pregnant and I guess I’m “nesting” as they call it.  I never experienced this when I was pregnant with my first, or maybe I did because we moved into a new place the month before he was born and I spent the last few weeks of my pregnancy unpacking boxes and moving the furniture around again and throwing stuff away that was perfectly good enough to move to this new house only a few weeks ago.  Also, I set up an elaborate nursery.  And helped my Mom paint an enormous mural.  Ok, so maybe I nested.  I called it “moving in.”    

Flash forward five years and you’ll find me organizing everything.  Every closet.  Every drawer.  Every cabinet.  I’m purging things which seems crazy because we live pretty simply with the goal of not accumulating “stuff.”  Still, I’ve found things to purge.  Things are getting donated and thrown away.  Surfaces are getting cleaned and scrubbed and vacuumed and mopped.  At first, I thought this behavior was totally necessary since this new baby does not have a nursery space and we need to somehow fit him into our bedroom (which is tiny because we live in a tiny house in the city and we love it but it is tiny).  Our dresser is doubling as a changing table and my armoire is now Baby’s closet.  However, even when I finished arranging our bedroom and finding places for all of the baby gear around the house, I still continued to feel unsettled until I reorganized certain areas.  We spent a big portion of the weekend organizing spaces.  My husband loved it.  It was his favorite weekend in a long time.  No need to double check.  Just trust me.  I have a few more areas on my list and I was eager to get to them today.  If I could just finish those last few areas, I’d finally feel ready and be able to rest.

This morning, I woke up in a panic, as I do many mornings, thinking about our children in the DR.  With tears in my eyes, I said a prayer for them and flipped through the many pictures of them on my phone.  My heart has been heavy with thoughts of them all day.  I went about my morning finding new areas to declutter, but finally stopped to drink a cup of coffee and attempt to relax.  While I was sitting, I realized: this nesting instinct is so strong, but I will never be able to satiate it.  It is perfectly normal and usual for me to be making room for the baby of our family while making sure that there is adequate room for all of his siblings.  However, I’ll never be able to quiet my heart until ALL of my children are right where they belong under our roof.  It is such a strange feeling for my heart to be totally and completely overjoyed by the upcoming birth of our child while simultaneously, that same heart is aching for children thousands of miles from me.  How can my heart and soul hold such huge feelings at the same time?  How can I ever really feel ready for Baby when my heart isn’t quite whole? 

We’ve endured a few months of “radio silence” on the DR side of things, which was to be expected here at the beginning of the process.  Our dossier is complete and in the hands of our lawyers and our immigration paperwork has all been submitted and we are waiting on an official answer from them.  Meanwhile, we pray and wait and send messages and letters and sometimes we grumble because we are human and waiting is hard.  We trust that God has the timing of this entire journey completely in His hands and we must just be willing to move when it’s time. His time, not my time. 

I will continue to wrestle with these big “mom feelings” and pray that I can give my very best love to this new little guy while still being an adequate mother to my big little guy and a patiently waiting mother to the rest of my beloved children.