Laughing with Sarah

There are always plenty of things to be anxious about while you are pregnant. It's just the way of things. Even for the most normal pregnancies, there will always be anxiety. Have I gained enough weight? Have I gained too much? How do I know the baby is there before I'm showing and before I can hear the heartbeat? Am I going to get bad morning sickness? Will my ankles puff up to gigantic proportions in the third trimester? What will labor and delivery be like? Will I be a good mother? I am pretty sure that there is not one woman out there who, while pregnant, didn't encounter a little bit of anxiety about something, anything, at some point. But I have to be honest here. When you've lost pregnancies, anxiety stops being something normal, small, or usual. In the early weeks of this pregnancy, I was one constant ball of anxiety. Both of my losses were early and unavoidable. And so I counted every week. Six weeks put me farther along than either of my previous losses....

Finally got brave enough to tell my story on my all-purpose blog. Thought it was worth posting here as well! For the last five years of my life, something has been happening in the background. You've heard a lot in this space about my journey through seminary and internship, and my first years of being a pastor. You've heard about my family and some of my vacations, my love for baseball and knitting, my thoughts on dialogue and division, and my crazy idealism for the world we live in. Recently, because I've been busy, you've mostly gotten lots and lots of sermon transcripts. But behind all of this, for the last five years, Matt and I have been on a long journey to try to start a family. It has been quite a journey. A journey that has included frustration and tears, losses and medical interventions, countless needle-stabs and blood draws, surgeries (major and minor), and through it all, enough peace in our hearts to keep stepping forward, one day at a time, witho...

Anybody out there have advice as to how to keep THE CRAZY at bay? It hasn't even been a week since learning that I was pregnant, and I am already going out of my mind. I constantly think about whether my boobs are as sore as they were yesterday, or if I am feeling more cramping, or if I'm too tired or not tired enough. My heart races every time I use the bathroom because I'm sure I'm going to find bleeding. As I type this, well, WOW, how's that for a lot of TMI...but if you've been there, you know what I mean. Every day, I am sure that THIS will be the day that I'll lose this pregnancy, and every night, instead of feeling thankful for making it through another day, I feel anxious about what the next day might bring. I hope against hope that my crazy brain will quiet down after Monday morning's ultrasound. I'm going to be a huge ball of nerves between now and then. All three of my losses have been early. Within the first week and a half of knowing...

I get a little weepy if I think too hard about what I was doing exactly one week ago today. Last Sunday night, after a fabulously fun progressive dinner with the high school youth group, I came home and my tummy felt a little crampy and "off," which seemed like it had everything to do with eating WAY TOO MUCH DELICIOUS FOOD. (Seriously, all other thing aside, the brownie hot fudge sundae at our last dinner stop was probably not my best decision.) Went to the bathroom before leaving church, and whatever Saturday spotting had been there seemed to have gone away. During the twenty-minute ride home, I had some serious cramping, and was really uncomfortable, but again, figured it was intestines and food-related. I went to the bathroom, and, well, lots of bleeding. Lots and lots. It didn't freak me out as much as it just made me sad. I knew right away that we were losing this pregnancy. Last Sunday night was pretty terrible. Painful cramps that came in waves, and s...

We were driving back from northern Minnesota on Monday, and along the first stretch of our drive through a series of small lakes and small towns, we also drove through a series of faith-laden billboards. One of them simply said "God Loves You" in some seriously fancy script. Cool. Unfortunately, it was followed by two or three pro-life, anti-abortion billboards. Let me say, from the get-go, that I despise the culture of anti-abortion advertising and maneuvering. Let me also say from the get-go that I am usually very quiet about my opinions on this matter. If I had to define myself, I guess I'd say that I live with a pretty expansive pro-all-life ideology. Meaning that I value life in all forms. So if you pushed me, I'd want there to be fewer abortions rather than more abortions...but I also really want wars to stop and guns to be controlled and violence to end and the death penalty to be revoked. And if you really really pushed me to put a more political bo...

Snapshot #1: I just responded to a book review written by a friend of mine on his blog. I was attending a conference based on this book during my "one week wait," that is, the last seven days before you either get your period or figure out you're pregnant. It's a strange window of time for those of us trying to conceive. You try to figure out if you feel any signs of being pregnant, and then even if you think you do, you have to figure out if they might simply be PMS symptoms that you hadn't thought to notice before. It was during my days at this conference that I started feeling strange things that led me to believe that I might be pregnant. I remember my time at the conference being clouded by my preoccupation with every twinge, pain, or cramp, trying to piece together any preemptive evidence that might give me a clear picture of whether or not I was pregnant. The conference took place on a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday...and it was Sunday at the end of t...

A friend shared this link on Facebook today and I thought it was worth sharing. It's an article called " The Barren Woman Bible ," written by one of my former seminary professors. She says, amid other things, In real life, barrenness is much more complicated. It's infertility and miscarriages. It's bleeding and not-bleeding—but on the opposite schedule than you want. It's counting days, doctor visits, taking blood, running tests, more doctor's visits and a slew of bills and—if you're lucky enough—insurance forms. And did I mention what it does to sex?! What was once fun and adventurous can become calculated, programmed or halted. And then there's the ending. In real life, God's "fix" is not always a boy-prophet. Sometimes it's adoption. Sometimes it's a birthed child. Sometimes it's nieces and nephews. Sometimes it's finding peace with childlessness. At least that's how it is for me and the other women who I...

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. ...

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...

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.....