Today I am reflecting on time.

This week I turned 33 years old, and so I decided to celebrate all the threes, 33!  I had a few friends over for an afternoon tea party and we learned how to knit.  Yup….you may have been mistaken into thinking that I was actually having my 65th Birthday Party.  But haven’t you heard?  Knitting is totally hipster.

Thinking about turning 33 I realise that I am quickly heading towards 35.  Yeh, yeh, that is two years away.  But 35 is the age that women apparently ‘may find it more difficult to get pregnant’…note – it can be difficult, not impossible.  And that is to be said for a woman who was supposedly more fertile than myself.  So, if the next round of IVF is successful and we do decide to have a second child I would definitely be past 35 if we ever tried to conceive again.  Not exactly what I had in mind!   But time is never going to be on my side and I can’t cheat it!

Today as I did a bit of early spring cleaning, I took down our four photo frames Chris and I put together for our Wedding day.  They were starting to curl and look a bit raggedy.

I peeled the photos off the frame and I noticed the lack of wrinkles on my face in some of the photos.  A couple were from over eight years ago when Chris and I first met.  As I look in the mirror today I see my slightly more pronounced furrow lines and wonder how much my life experience impacts these lines.  Often we associate wrinkles with ‘wisdom in life’, and I sure feel like that.  Since I met Chris we have done incredible things in our lives.  If I were to die today I would think I had led a pretty amazing life and would go with a smile.  But experience and wisdom doesn’t simply come from the good things in life, it’s also the bad things.  I think it’s difficult to truly appreciate the good things without experiencing some pain.  So when I see those furrow lines in the mirror I don’t just see time fading, I see time enriching me.

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” – Jean Paul Sartre

With infertility, I want time to pass quickly, I’m always waiting. The dreaded two week wait (How many of those have I written about on this blog now??!), waiting to start treatment or waiting to end treatment!  But I don’t want it to pass so quickly that my furrows grow deeper and I realise too late that infertility made me accidentally press the pause button on gaining that life experience and wisdom – the good, bad and ugly.

So as I move forward into 2016, my new year’s resolution is to embrace time and make every bit of sand in that hourglass of life count for something.