It’s retrieval day!!!!
It has been feeling like the (an) end to this journey, but it’s actually just the beginning.
It’s the end of hormone injections and the related symptoms, and the end of a great many questions and nervousness. The end of three failed iui treatments and all the associated emotions. And yet it’s the beginning of an even more intense period of waiting for phone calls from the lab on the development of our little one (ones).
It’s beginning again down a road into a dark forest and not knowing what’s on the other side.
Will we get lost in there? Another gigantic disappointment, another cycle to wait and more hormones before a frozen transfer if this one doesn’t stay? How much of this roller coaster can we take? It’s been such a wild ride. But for the first time in my life even amidst sometimes crushing disappointment nothing feels like life or death.
I never even pictured having another baby, ever.
I spent most of my life worrying I didn’t deserve, nor was I up to the task of the first three. So to find myself standing here, calmly walking toward my next dream with confidence and joy. It is a dream like no other. I’ve already won the lottery, and written the best seller, and recognized my singing voice on stage in a moment of sheer shock and gratitude. Finding my love already feels like all those things mixed.
It has changed me so profoundly I am becoming rewired.
So many of my anxieties are calmed. And this isn’t a momentary high from idealizing something that turns out much differently. This is the real deal. Steady on my feet and walking headfirst toward another amazing dream, one I never saw.
It’s not very often life surprises me.
This is because whenever it did when I was young, and that was often, those were not good surprises. I became hyper vigilant and carefully in control of each happening to avoid further pain. But that has its side effects. And finding this love has surrendered me back into a childlike dreamer I was always meant to be.
I’ve turned my Stephen King movie into a John Hughes one. Sorry Stephen I love your work, I just wouldn’t want to be in one…. again.
And I used to be too fragile to be in the creation of a dream. Any setback would crumble and tumble me, and lead me down a path of dark thinking and misery.
Now I am finding faith and a well balanced way to view reality.
So it’s neither fantastic or terrible, but a mixture of both of those moments on a steadfast bridge of love.
I have a family of best friends on there with me, and I’m finally adjusting to life in partnership and belonging that I couldn’t feel I deserved before. Now I am accepting this as my life, and everything that comes with it.
So here we are…. I’m about to be a “nearing 40” new mother. Here I am, the happiest I’ve ever been.
At another new beginning….with knowing there will still be so many more.