The "i" Word

Well, today it's official. It's been a year. It can be labelled.  And it's a label I never wanted, a label I never thought I'd have.

I've hesitated to write much of the depth of my grief and the difficulty of this season for so many reasons. Perhaps the greatest is that I fear there will come a day when our present situation has changed and these days of waiting and longing are a distant memory and I happen upon this space and reread the aching of my heart and roll my eyes at the dramatics of it all.  Living in fear of the opinion of my future self. Solid logic.

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Right now, it just feels all consuming. It is so scary and embarrassing and lonely and painful and exhausting and oh, so very painful. I cried in Target today.  I stood there, right in the middle of the baby aisle, shopping for a baby gift for a friend.  To my left, there stood a new mom with a fuzzy tuft of white hair peeking out of the baby carrier she wore. To my right stood a heavily pregnant teen who was flippantly registering for every.single.thing on the shelves. And there stood I, aching at that very moment with the monthly reminder of our failure, of my empty womb.

I decided that I'd just order something on Amazon.

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It's been a year now, and this year has looked nothing like I thought it would.  I thought we'd have a three-month-old by now. I remember the naivete of the earlier days, joking about timing and whether we should attempt to "slant the odds" in favor of having a boy or a girl.  It didn't take long before all we wanted was two pink lines.

We've been in our house for almost a year now, and it's still just the two of us. The door to what is supposed to be our nursery stays closed most of the time. We say it's to save heat, but I know that it's more to save our hearts.

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"Infertility," she said. "There are options," she told me. And my head just swam.

I don't want options. I just want the old-fashioned, you-and-me-between-the-sheets and a surprise "positive" two weeks later. I don't want interventions, I want "us" incarnated. The numb begins in my toes and spreads throughout my body until it reaches my eyes and spills over into tears.

I cry a lot now.

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I struggle to keep a good attitude.  A friend recently posted about how waiting to find out her baby's gender was "killing her," and all I could think about was how she knows nothing of waiting.  I'm afraid that the longer our waiting stretches into years the more the hope in my heart shrinks. And yet, somehow, every month on the 29th day, my hopes climb more rapidly than logic should allow.

And then the roller coaster hits its peak and comes speeding, fast, towards the ground.  Failed again.