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.