Not Pregnant (Yet?)

It's been 4 years since I made a blog post. Maybe I'll talk about the whys and wherefores in a post after this one, but for now, I just want to use this post the same way I always have... To talk to people on a massive scale about what's on my mind.

There are two truths:

I want kids.

I'm not pregnant.*

I've been very reluctant to talk about this to the world at large. As if by saying it in the public sphere I could be jinxing myself. But when have I ever been private with my life and my personal stuff?  I really haven't been able to figure it out. Why is this something I've been keeping on the down-low? Maybe I wanted it to be a surprise? Like anyone who's ever known me is under the illusion that I wasn't sure if I wanted children. Or maybe I want to avoid pity, but honestly who has time to bother with pity? (If you do, go pity someone else, not me.) I certainly don't want to seem like I'm judging anyone who does choose to keep quiet about their fertility challenges. But that's not me. I plan on letting the world know I'm pregnant pretty quickly. If I have a miscarriage, I want people to understand why I'm not myself. I'm not one to hold my grief in, I'm one to blog about it daily for two years. 😉

I was kinda hoping it would be easy. I was hoping that unlike a lot of stuff in my life, pregnancy would be one of those things that I said I was ready for and it would then happen.  On the other hand, I was pretty well expecting that it wouldn't be easy. I know several people who have struggled to get pregnant and many who have had miscarriages. It feels like a very common struggle these days. (Btw, I've not had a miscarriage. I have no idea the physical and emotional pain that is to deal with, and I very much don't want to have to go through that, but in some ways even not having a miscarriage is a little scary because it is a sign that it's even possible for a person to get pregnant. )

And on top of the "why does this have to be hard too?!" complaint is how frustrating it still is to be so out of step with my peers.

Nathan and I decided to start trying for a baby the month that he was diagnosed. This was a little bit before or right around the time that most of our friendship group started trying. If that had happened, that "baby" would have been 8 years old by now. But instead of getting pregnant I was a different sort of caretaker, and then I was grieving, and then searching for the right person all over again. The people I went to high school with are having "last" babies. The people I went to college with are pregnant with "thirds." The people my age who don't want kids are finally getting to the point where others have stopped asking them when they will have kids. And then there's me... I'm 35, so my first pregnancy will be a "geriatric" pregnancy (And no, I'm not being melodramatic, that's what they call pregnancies in women over 35.) And I want 2 children! I would be legit excited about having twins mainly because it's two babies, but the timeline of one. There's no getting around this one. I married younger men, I look young, I'm young at heart, but my age is still the number of years I've lived on this planet, and it's not going down. Maybe if we didn't live in the Midwest, it wouldn't feel as off. Maybe if I hadn't been ready to have kids for nearly 10 years now, it wouldn't be as frustrating. But this is where I am.

I keep coming up with ideas of when it would be a good time to announce or surprise people that then pass. Valentine's day, Easter, when my parents visited in August, my niece's birthday, Halloween.... Maybe no one cares, outside of my immediate family. That's fine, but I suspect there has been some speculating. I haven't gotten a lot of pointed questions. I think everyone gets afraid to ask because they want to respect privacy and it's no longer something that's "expected" of a married couple. But sometimes I wish people would just talk about stuff in the open. I can't get upset about how anyone else wants to handle their personal stuff, but I would far prefer to be transparent. We don't know much at the moment. I appear to be healthy, though obviously shedding some pounds would help. I haven't (yet) been diagnosed with anything like PCOS that would make it more difficult. If I weren't 35 we wouldn't even quite be at the place to talk to a doctor, but again the clock it ticks and I must obey, so I have at least one appt in the next few months to address this and find out if there is something wrong. Maybe there is nothing wrong. Maybe there is a lot wrong. Either way, I don't want to wait until I've got a success story before I'm willing to talk about it.

25-year-old me has told 35-year-old me several times that thinking about it and stressing about it isn't going to help anything. To just relax and be patient. But 35 year old me is too aware of the mortality of loved ones, the passing of time and how fleeting everything is.

There is a really great Adam Ruins Everything episode that Kara shared with me that helped. I know it's not as rosy of a picture as Adam wants to paint, but it does help to see a different side of the doom and gloom train I've been riding on ever since I graduated college.

So I guess what I want to say is if you are the praying sort, pray for me. If you are the good vibes sort, send those my way, too. If you know some secret pregnancy elixir I should take... well that sounds sketch as all get-out so I probably won't take it but at least tell me about it so that I can laugh with my friends later. If you don't care, I don't know why you've read this far. 😋 I haven't given up, and there is still time, but if I didn't *start* talking about it instead of hiding from it, at some point, it was going to drive me crazy,

*I mean, I guess it's possible that I am and I don't know yet, but it seems unlikely.