Karma Bitch-Slap

Most of my long-time readers know that Dan and I have been trying to get pregnant for two years without success, and I stopped talking about it a year or so ago. What most of them don't know is that I've had two early miscarriages in that time, so early that I wouldn't have known they were miscarriages were it not for state-of-the-art pregnancy tests. Dozens of blood tests and studies have revealed no cause for me to not be able to get pregnant, except for such slight hypothyroidism that it actually resolved itself in less time than it took for me to allow the medication I was given for it to build up to therapeutic levels. The OB-GYN, high-risk OB-GYN, endocrinologist, and reproductive endocrinologist officially had no explanation for me, especially when they considered that I was pregnant with Max ten weeks after getting married. My OB-GYN offered me a round of Clomid last year, "just to see what happens," but after talking about the possibilities of multiples and all of the resulting complications, I said no.

So that was just how it was going to be: Dan and Molly and Max. I stopped taking my temperature and I stopped checking to see if I was ovulating and stopped really doing much of anything except the thing that gets you pregnant in the first place. It just wasn't worth the heartache and the anxiety and the getting amped up and let down every month.

And yet I still had all the heartache and anxiety and getting amped up and let down every month. We wanted another baby so much that it was hard to put it into words, and Dan is a pretty flexible guy and he said that it was fine if it was just Dan and Molly and Max, but he wanted it and I wanted it and even Max wanted it. And every time he said "I want a sister," it just tore through me like a knife. But I was accepting that it was going to just be this way, that the three of us were the family I was meant to have.

For a few weeks, I've been feeling not quite right. I feel not quite right a lot of the time though, and I typically write it off to low blood sugar, but now that I'm on the pump and can see my blood sugar at a glance, I can see that most of the time, that's not it. Food tastes funny, and not funny-good. Everything smells bad, and not good-bad. I am a bundle of nerves, moody, and mildy psychotic. I haven't really rushed to take a pregnancy test--I didn't want the letdown if it was negative, but also, I think, on some level, I didn't really need one to know.

There has been a rash of pregnancy announcements on the internet lately. First it was Tertia at So Close. Then it was Heather at Dooce. Every time someone's announced that they were pregnant in the last year or so, I have felt frustrated, impatient, a little jealous, excited for my friends, and so totally anxious about the fact that there just wasn't an explanation for the fact that I wasn't pregnant that I didn't really know what to do with myself. I am a little embarassed to sheepishly announce that finally, it's my turn.

We are pregnant, just when I thought it was never going to happen for us again, and I am experiencing a new emotion roughly every ten seconds. I am not a big fan of change and this will be a big one and it will mean a lot of things which I haven't fully wrapped my brain around. Every time I try, my eyeballs melt and begin leaking out of my skull, and also, I have a panic attack.

Yes indeed. Pregnant. Who'da thunk it?

P.S. Our parents don't know yet. If you know them, let's not tell them, shall we? They will be so excited that we told the internet first.