One Pink Line

Don’t think for one moment I have forgotten how crushing a one – lined pregnancy test is. I have only taken a couple hundred in my day; easily spending hundreds on both cheapies and the real deal tests that state as plain as day “not pregnant.”

I’ve actually grown to hate both kinds. The cheap ones I am constantly trying to decide whether to believe it or if maybe a slight pink pigment that showed for a second could be a sign that maybe, perhaps, possibly a little pregnancy hormone is coming through. The expensive ones are ridiculous, too. I spent the amount of money I could have spent on a gallon of chocolate peanut butter ice cream to console the painfully obvious (to you, logical plastic test) that I am NOT pregnant. What a waste of money for a stick to ridicule me.

I am not pregnant. I wasn’t trying to get pregnant. But when your body starts to slightly act like it’s pregnant, one begins to wonder. And after the initial accepting that I may be pregnant, though it would be possibly dangerous if I were because of my future plans in the next months, I had actually grown quite fond of the idea.

Last Saturday, however, it was very clear that these hormonal catastrophes happening to my body were just that, my body freaking out. I definitely am not pregnant.

To you women that have taken these tests copious times and have received the same devastating news: I’m so sorry. Just one month of my body’s confusion and I am catapulted back into the realization that my fertility and my hopes and my baby making ability is still as fragile as the next girl’s.

I told one friend that the realization that I really wasn’t pregnant, even though 10 tests told me the same truth, (don’t laugh – everything within me told me I was pregnant), felt in many ways I was miscarrying all over again.

Miscarriage. Such a drowning word. A word that suffocated me for so long and suffocates so many others. A word, and most definitely an excruciating event, that I was ignorant about until it actually happened to me. To ME.

My loss this time around was just the loss of an idea. I didn’t lose a child. I just lost the joy within to think I may have had another little boy on the way. And in many respects, I felt robbed.

Yesterday I received the baby book I ordered online for my future little man. I have bought all my children’s baby books on Amazon and I specifically chose this one because I had already assumed the gender and the name.

So what do I do with this? How am I allowed to feel?

My heart goes out to the women that have endured this far longer than I have. My brokenness secretly shakes my fist at God and asks “Why that girl and not this one?”

I have no answers. I only have tears. I have tears for you dear woman, my dear sister, my friend that I’ve known longer than my husband. I have tears for myself because this fertility thing, this wanting a baby so bad thing, well, it doesn’t go away.

This morning I was sprawled out on my back with Tosten next to me and we were looking at train books. He was talking his Tosten-two-year-old dialect to me, eyebrows raised, smile like a piece of heaven, and all of a sudden it hit me.

He’s my baby. He’s my impossible child. He’s my miracle. He was the plastic stick that I took to prove to the doctor I STILL wasn’t pregnant and I’d need to take more pills to get my body going again.

I have my baby boy. I have my baby girl. Two little human beings I thought I’d never have a chance to have. Those two toothy grins are all that matters.

So another month. We aren’t trying to get pregnant, but if I’ve learned anything, God has an interesting sense of humor. He can make life out of nothing. And the pain of this last month only reminds me of where God has brought me and the two little gifts He has already blessed me with.

To you women out there that have endured this pain…I know you understand me…and man, it feels good to not be alone.

Yesterday the heart, Today the mind!

I ran 8.5 miles today. I vowed from the day I moved into our little farmhouse by the ethanol plant that I would conquer my highway and run the little over 4 miles and back to a childhood memory house of Charlie and Carol Piekarski. It only took three years (and two babies) later for me to finally put my shoes on and start the trek, but I did it! I actually did it!

As I was running back from their house, every member on my face was curved in a smile. I was absolutely elated. Proud. I felt like I could have run forever, well, at least to my house. But then it occurred to me, man, Manda, how in the world do you expect to run a 26.2 mile race if your longest run is only 8.5 miles?

With that one thought, my whole delight deflated.

My gait started to slow, my breathing began to get heavier and more difficult and I realized, man alive, there’s no way I’m ready for a stupid marathon!

It was in that moment that I heard so clearly within a bulging question, “Manda, I have your heart, but what about your mind?”

I have never thought of that before. I’m pretty sure God has ALL OF ME, but maybe not. Probably not.

See, I have been on a heart kick lately: my new motto being about the transformation of the heart. I would say it is quite a bit more than a kick, more like a soapbox…

I am tired of the restraints I put myself and God into. I am tired of the outward holiness I and other Christians hold onto while we’re rotting inside of wretchedness and judgmental pride. I am sick of being bound by have tos and that I have lost what it means to be transformed from the inside out and just doing anything good out of the honest love for Jesus Christ. I am so tired of how some of those I love are judged by how many times they are in church a week. And I am even more disgusted by how many times we can beat those that desperately need hope with more Law and more things their failing at and more shoulds and have tos. Sigh. See, my soapbox. Sorry…but like I said, those are some things God has been working in me lately…well, until today.

Until today when not only did God question my heart, but my mind. The voice within continued, “I can do far more within you than your body can accomplish! Give me your mind.”

I am ashamed. While it is a continuous effort and surrender of my heart to Christ, it becomes easier and easier as He woos me and creates in me the peace and joy and unending contentment from being with Him. But somehow, in the messiness of life, I have divorced my heart from my mind. While I am asking for an undivided heart and one that follows what makes His heart beat, I have forgotten what it means to give Him (next to the heart) perhaps the most powerful and dangerous part of myself.

For most of my life, I have convinced myself that I was unlovable, too fat, genderless and the only way to feel alright again was to stuff myself with food. I allowed people to define me by their words and their glances and their interactions with me, which as you can imagine in this senile world, were not always positive. I allowed the very definition of Manda to be determined by confused, broken individuals just like me. And I only ate to continue their prophecies over me.

What.
A.
Mistake.

I wish I could say that this thinking is far gone from me, but I would be lying. I have grown up a bit from these thoughts, but instead of trying to measure up, I find myself trying to attain what I lost from the past. Longing to know what it feels like to be in “the best shape of my life” and to wear a fancy prom dress (I always wanted to go to some type of formal occasion) or even wear a wedding dress I felt knockout gorgeous in (don’t ask about my wedding dress experience).

And even stupid dreams like that, they are still dreams. I still have a feeling of wanting what was kept from me…and yet, what was truly kept?

I have allowed my morbid obesity to follow me. Whether I wear the label anymore or not, I have lived in its shadow and let it stop me from doing things I’ve always wanted to do.

So when do I step out and stop hiding? When do I rip off the chains and say so longto the painful labels and memories? When do I start to spread the transformation of my heart to clarify the confusion in my mind?

Today.

This year.

2014.

See, I have tried multiple times now to muster up some type of writing for this blog. Thoughts came. Sometimes I would start the first few sentences and then stop, only to be forgotten and abandoned. And since I started to finally coin myself as a writer, after writing for over two decades and even going to college for it, I felt like this was my new beginning.

But maybe that’s just it…maybe I’m still in the beginning.

I asked the Lord in January that He would do something different in this year. When I said different, I really didn’t know how that would look, but I was willing to roll with it. And the Lord definitely heard my prayer, in more ways than I could possibly comprehend or compile in a little writing on this little blog…so I haven’t written a word. In fears of belittling or stealing the mysterious beauty of what God was doing, I have felt like my hands were to be still and my words be hushed…

Until the right moment.

So here I am, in the awkward place for a writer. I have no happy ending or special pinpointed message for my reader to take away from my ramblings. I have thoughts spewed all over the screen. I have no direction and no special finish to make you feel satisfied. But to be honest, that’s exactly where I am in the process, too.

Is it okay to be somewhere in the beginning and still write about it? I assume I’m in the beginning. I mean, even now, I have no clue where God is taking me with my heart and my brain and my silly dreams of marathons and prom dresses and maybe even assisting Christine Caine in her ministry to stop human trafficking. I just know something needs to be fixed. Something within me is starting to surface and it’s about time I wake up to smell more than roses, but those prickly thistles that have lined my journey…I mean they give off some beautiful purple blossoms, too.

It’s time to let God do some rewiring in my mind…and maybe connect my heart and brain again.

As far as the running, well, I’ll just keep training. I need more protein and more strength training to get rid of that rubbing belly when I run, says the YMCA trainer. But I guess that may take years, so I’ll just keep going and see what else God says during my runs.