I never know what to say.
We've only been married for 9 months, but we're old... I am 39, my husband 44 and this fact is not lost on any of our friends. And so the comments come up, a lot.
And the funniest part is no one ever questions the if... they question the when.
Let me start with Saturday... we were at a party with some old and cherished friends of my husband's. They all have kids... some one, some three, some through adoption or ivf or some through what comes naturally. But they all have them. And they all can apparently hear my biological clock.
I am drawn to kids. I love the things they say, or how the brother and sister gang up to keep me trapped in our modified version of Mouse Trap. I love how they will hop into my husbands lap and confess that her parents met each other before they met her, and when would we meet our kids? And i actually love the one little boy who argues with me and tells me that I am a mom. Because i completely feel like I am.
The kids are too precious to me, each one of them funny and charming, and sometimes spoiled and difficult, but they are perfect. You can see why their parents love them so much. And this natural inclination in me, to listen to children as they talk, and play with them sitting on the floor in the midst of a pot luck where i was required to read name tags before addressing the veritable strangers who greet me as a best friend merely as an extension of the man I married, this is what leads them all to say "when we have kids".
"You are so natural, so maternal" says our host as she admonishes us to hurry up and get on with it. See, the thing is... i'm a bit shy. I can be dirty and raunchy and funny. But this journey is so incredibly personal and so incredibly painful that I can't talk about it yet with my family, or friends, so far it is my husband and any hapless wanderers to this blog page.
I am fairly certain that this is why i have the blog. Because i feel like i am able to confess my secrets, the way you might confess to a stranger on a plane who you will never see again that you cheated on your high school boyfriend. It is cathartic and it prepares me for the question of "when" from the people in my life.
The problem is that for us it isn't a when.
On my 39th birthday i had my period start about a week early. And then after 24 hours of a very minor period it stopped. And I knew that we had finally got the best birthday present ever. Our baby. A pregnancy test on cycle day 27 revealed i was pregnant.
Two weeks later I wasn't.
It was devastating. There's no other words. The pain was unbearable, not just physically but my heart was wrenched from my body with the loss of that pregnancy. And i knew then why you wait until you are 13 weeks to share the news. Because the pain is so great that you carry that secret with you deeply inside what is left of your heart.
Our baby should have been born in May. Which always leads me to think about where i should be right now in our pregnancy. We should be fighting over names and picking out furniture for the nursery. Instead I am peeing on ovulation prediction sticks again.
And the hardest thing is I never know how to answer the questions. Do people want to know about my phantom baby that still lives in my memories? Do they want to know the pain of each month realizing that the two week wait was for nothing. Do I smile and laugh and pretend it doesn't matter and then collapse in tears in my husbands arms as soon as we get to our car? Do people want to really know that we are "trying" and all the inherent unromantic it-doesn't-matter-if-you-are-tired-tonight-you-have-to precision of it all?
Or do people still think that the stork brings babies... and we just haven't bothered to call and order ours yet?
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