Laughing with Sarah

There is, admittedly, a lot to process about the past few days' experience. Especially given that there is a lot left to process about these last few months and years. At some point, I'll probably recount my time in the hospital, and try to process my feelings about that experience. But for this morning, I think I just want to admit that as brave as I am trying to be about going forward with the new and limited options for us to start a family...I'm not feeling so brave this morning. I don't feel the same resentment as I've felt at other points; I am not struggling with the feelings of inadequacy from unexplained fertility. Now I just know my limitations. But they are BIG limitations. I am no longer in a group of people even able to pretend that we can have kids of our own, unassisted. Or even with small assistance. On the Today Show this morning, they were telling the story of a woman who, after having 11 (yes, 11!) kids, finally decided to go back to ...

Needing some prayers at the moment. With the spotting I'd had this week, I was obviously worried that this pregnancy was headed the same direction as last time. But it turns out that it was headed somewhere worse. I woke up with terrble abdominal pain today. Tried to go to work, but after about an hour, couldn’t deal with it, so I had a good friend drive me over me to the ER. They checked me out, and immediately scheduled me for surgery with a presumed ectopic pregnancy. Turns out that I have TONS of scar tissue from having an appendectomy way back when I was 11. They removed a mass from my left side, scraped out a bunch of scar tissue, and took part of my left tube. They also discovered that my right tube is pretty damaged from the scar tissue as well. So the worst news in all of this is that, at this point, it is dangerous for us to try to conceive normally at this point. A 75% chance of ending up with another ectopic. There are big questions left on the table for Mat...

If this pregnancy fails, it is not your fault. If this pregnancy fails, you did nothing wrong. If this pregnancy fails, there is nothing wrong with you and you are not broken. From the American Pregnancy Association website: Most miscarriages cannot be prevented. They are often the body's way of dealing with an unhealthy pregnancy that was not developing. A miscarriage does not mean that you cannot have a future healthy pregnancy or that you yourself are not healthy. If you happen to go two-for-two on pregnancies and losses, this is not your fault. You are healthy. You are strong. You have no reason to believe that you won't someday have a beautiful healthy baby of your own.

Two good days, two bad days. Friday was great.  A cool, sunny fall day.  I had the day off, and took the day to do some much-needed errands: returning library books, getting my cell phone fixed, BUYING YARN (yes, that is always awesome), and enjoying a delicious junk-food lunch (thank you, Wendy's) while lingering over a good book. Saturday was equally as great.  Matt and I got up, went to the farmers market, took our stash onward to the Morton Arboretum for a picnic by Lake Marmo, and then came home to watch baseball and snuggle on the couch.  That evening, we went out to Barnes and Noble to browse, then stopped by our favorite restaurant for dessert.  For me, it was really important to have a good and distracting Saturday.  Our last pregnancy only made it one week, and for this pregnancy, Saturday was that day.  So it was a strange milestone, and we made it through with flying colors! Then yesterday.  Sunday.  Woke up, all was well. ...

Pardon me for being a nervous, twitch, crazy-lady. I realize that in being such, I've talked a lot about my pregnancy, and a lot about my previous loss, but not much about the other pieces of this journey. A week ago, before that pink plus sign, I certainly would have identified myself by my inability to conceive. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about before I went to bed. My infertility is definitely a bigger part of me than my loss, and at this point, a bigger part of me than this current pregnancy. So I should talk a little about it, shouldn't I? We suffered in silence for a long time. Remember how we started ttc in March 2008 (however unofficially)? It was March of 2011 before I got off my butt to do anything about it. It, too, was sparked by a phone call. My best friend from high school called me out of the blue. And, of course, out of the blue phone calls mean one of a very very short list of things. Pregna...

On the morning back in January 2010 when I lost my only other pregnancy, I woke up feeling great. Feeling not pregnant. Feeling like myself. Which means that this time around, I am searching and clinging to symptoms and signs, trying to ease my mind, as if somehow "feeling normal" means that this pregnancy, too, is doomed. Common sense would tell me that it's normal to feel normal, especially this early in a pregnancy. And I want to believe it. And, trust me on this one, it bugs the hell out of me that I can't. I would really rather be a normal person, able to trust my body and trust God. But I'm not. I'm a crazy-lady. Yesterday, I felt great. Boobs not so sore, didn't feel sick, didn't feel bloated. Just felt like me. Which was terrifying. Overnight, I woke up with crazy stomach pains. Not nausea. Not feeling sick. Just flat-out painful stomach cramps. Not that you care, but I'm guessing it was a ridiculous case of gas pain. ...

I'm afraid of doing a repeat of January 2010. Things then started off much like they did this past Sunday morning, except that it was winter. Thursday, January 7, 2010 Holy crap, it looks like I’m a little bit pregnant... I can hardly believe it. I usually set an alarm for 6am to temp, but then don’t get up until 7:45 or so. Today, I woke up just before 6 and my temp was through the roof. I couldn’t force myself to stay and bed and sleep for another two hours - I got up immediately and POAS. Couldn’t believe my eyes! It had started snowing overnight, and so I went back to bed, woke up DH, told him “Hey guess what - it’s snowing and pretty outside!….And hey, guess what - we’re going to have a baby!” Needless to say, I didn’t get back to sleep. I remember bits and pieces from the days following those first words: having a meeting in the city and using all of my self-control to keep from telling one of my friends there that I was pregnant, having a choir rehearsal wearing my n...

Today is the third day of knowing that I'm pregnant. It is the first day that I didn't take a pregnancy test...I'm saving that third one for sometime next week, when I'm feeling sad or scared or anxious. I had expected to feel only one set of emotions at this point. I figured that I would either remember my previous loss and feel scared, anxious, and pessimistic...or I would emotionally write off that previous loss as a fluke and throw myself headlong into hope, excitement, and baby-craziness. Turns out, I'm a mix of all of those things. It makes life confusing. Sunday afternoon, the day I had gotten that first pink plus sign, I wandered alone around Target. I made a beeline for the baby section, and looked at things, touched things...and had to seriously resist buying a tiny little hat, just to have it. I was that committed to this pregnancy and this baby. I went over by the books and magazines, and thumbed through two different "week by week"...

In case you were wondering about the title of the blog, it is a reference to Genesis 18, where old, infertile Sarah is promised by a mysterious stranger that she would yet have a child...and she does what we'd all expect her to do: she laughs. A good year or two into this struggle to get pregnant, I thought about how often infertility shows up in the Bible. How many women are barren...or struck barren...and I at one point had huge plans to dig into all of these stories and perhaps write something - an article, a series of blog posts, a book? - about them all. Maybe this is a good space to dig into a few of them, maybe not. But for today, here's the story of the blog's namesake. I feel in good company with Sarah. --- God appeared to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent. It was the hottest part of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing. He ran from his tent to greet them and bowed before them. He said, "Master,...

It's really kind of funny to me that I didn't start this blog months or even years ago. In March of 2008, while I was doing my year-long ELCA internship in Rockford, I received a phone call from my older sister, who was living in Scotland at the time. My first thought when I heard her voice on the other end of the line was "uh-oh, what happened?" Because I certainly didn't expect to receive a run of the mill phone call from the other side of the world. But it turns out that she was calling with WONDERFUL news: she was going to have a baby. Her fourth, to be exact. I was 26 years old at that point. Matt and I had been married for three years, and I had not yet felt any sort of urgency or interest in starting a family. In fact, I had spoken to a few close friends, concerned about that fact that while I knew, deep inside my head and heart, that I wanted children, I was concerned that I hadn't yet felt that drive, that sense of "I need to do this.....