Mother's Day, pt 2

Here's the theme of my life: I had a plan and God changed it.  

I wanted to marry young (check), have kids pretty young, probably 3 but maybe 2.  For sure I wanted to at least be started before 30, if not nearly done by then.  That's how my mom and grandmother did it.  My grandparents were relatively young when I was little and were able to do stuff with me and play and I wanted that for my kids.  Plus, there are so many statistics about how much worse your chances for blah, blah, blah are after 30.  So if I was gonna be done or close to by 30, I needed to start having kids around 24, just to give myself plenty of cushion and all.

When we got married, we were both still in college so I didn't want to get pregnant right away.  Plus I knew marriage would be a learning curve and I wanted to give us awhile to be "us" before babies.  That's the way things are supposed to work, right?  So, about 6 months before we got married I went in for an annual and talked to the doctor and left with a prescription for birth control.  Cuz that's what people do. I started taking the pills and became progressively crazier.  We all blamed it on my 18 hour semester and impending wedding, but part of me knew it was the pills.  (Um, I had morning sickness.  Pretty sure crazy school and wedding plans don't give you morning sickness.)

Finished the semester, got married, took summer school, took a 17 hour semester, lived in a terrible run down apartment, was sick all the time, and somewhere very close to a year after I started taking the pill, I called the wonderful, amazing, can't say enough good things about this doctor or her nurses or her office staff, doctor I had in Belton.  (I seriously still miss that doctor and clinic today.  I wonder if the entire staff of that clinic would consider moving to West Texas?) By the time they answered, I was bawling.  I. was. a. mess.  The receptionist knew I lived around the corner (small office, I was sick A LOT while we lived in that apartment) and told me to come in and they would work me in.  I had myself back under control until the doctor walked into the room.  I told her that I was acting crazy, knew I was acting crazy, but could not stop myself and it had been progressively worse since I started taking birth control.  But I wasn't ready to have kids yet, I mean, I still had student teaching to get through, and R was gonna be in school even longer.  She talked through a couple options and put me on an entirely different (still medicinal) form of birth control, the theory being that it was less hormones going through my whole system and would help.

And it did.  I felt like myself again.  (Except for those two solid months I spent on prednisone trying to breathe...)

Once, after being on one medicine or another that cancels out birth control, I thought I might be pregnant.  But it was a tiny hope and not yet embedded in my heart.  I was wrong, anyways.

We moved out of that apartment, I finished student teaching, I spent a summer away from R finishing the credits I needed to graduate, I graduated, and it became my duty to support us while R finished school.  (Which didn't work out too well but that is a whole different messy story.)

Around the same time that I started this blog, after we'd been married two years, kind of scared to hear his answer, I asked R if I could go off birth control.  Like, completely.  Part of it was that this new birth control was beginning to build up in my system and I was beginning to feel a little crazy again.  Part of it was I wanted a baby of my own.  But it was still some small, vague desire.  We decided that he was only a couple months away from graduating and (like we actually knew what we meant when we said this) we wouldn't be trying to have a baby but we wouldn't be not trying.

R graduated and we moved back to CS.  Near family and friends and the church that still holds our heart.  A church full of children and families and pregnant women.  And I started working at a childcare center.  Full of babies.  And we joined a Sunday School class.  Full of people just slightly older than us.  And I became really good friends with someone who'd had a baby at 18.

I spent each month with mixed feelings of hope and dread.  And each month that I wasn't pregnant, the hope that I would be grew stronger and the dread that I would be lessened.  Then, suddenly, it morphed.  Instead of dreading being pregnant, I started to dread not being pregnant.  But this was all pretty much locked up in me.  People knew I wanted a baby, but they didn't know how much.

I think this is kind of indicative of me.  It may seem that I will share anything with anyone, but for the most part, I keep the deep stuff hidden.  I babble on about our house and crafts and stupid things I do and books and tv shows and trekking up a mountain to get to the sound booth and disastrous attempts to be a modern day Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I talked very little about my Aunt Sandy dying or about infertility or about the hurtful thing so and so said.  I'm like a babbling brook that comes up out of a hidden artesian spring.  

This? This is just the beginning of the story.  Stay tuned.

Branalyn