Two Days

Two days to go and I wonder...

What if this month would have been THE month?
What if there isn't anything wrong with me at all?

The week after my period I forget how it feels.  The sharp stabbing pains and the dull aching throbs of the last two weeks go away and I'm left with a few twinges.  Nothing major.  Nothing meriting surgery.  And so two days to go and I wonder do I need to do surgery at all?

I've been pouring over fertility blogs, trying to find someone like me.  Someone who has the same symptoms I have.  That's what I do when I'm stressed.  I read.  I seek out information that will confirm my ideas or challenge them.  But of all of the blogs I've read the only thing I'm coming up with is hopelessness instead of information. So many women are nursing broken hearts and drained bank accounts and there's no baby for them to show for it.  Will I become one of them?

Before this year I didn't realize that many friends of mine had been suffering through this for YEARS.  God, I'm still in the category of "months".   But years?  What's incredible is how graceful they are.  They smile.  They laugh.  They see other people's babies and don't go running from the room like mad women.  They seem to express sincere happiness for the women lucky enough to have what they so desperately want.

I don't think I will ever be like them.

I am jaded already.  Pregnancy is my divine right as a woman and the idea that it might be kept from me brings out this almost... animalistic? envy that I have never experienced for.  Like, the rational part of my brain shuts down when I see ANOTHER pregnancy announcement on Facebook and I want to ignore that person and only see them again when I have a baby of my own.  I know that's selfish.  It's ugly.  There's nothing heroic about it.  I guess I just don't really care at this point.

And that brings me to something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

If I get pregnant, I am refusing to allow family or friends to throw a baby shower.  It's a personal preference but it is one I have come to feel strongly about in the last few months.  This experience has opened my eyes to the reality that I have hurt people in the past with my happiness.  When I got married I had two bridal showers thrown for me and some of the people in attendance included my mom (who is a widow), a good friend (who'd recently been cheated on) and several divorced and single ladies.  I wonder if, in the midst of my joy, they were suffering to get through my two-hour hoorah.  While I opened purple packages from Bed, Bath and Beyond and ate cake, did they count the minutes until they could make it to the car and get away from me?  I don't think I could ever enjoy having a baby shower thrown for me now that I know what the flip-side feels like.  I don't want to do that to the people I care about.   I don't want it done to me now.

I have this daydream where I am pregnant and instead of having a baby shower,  I spend an entire day going from store to store to buy the things my baby would need.  Little bibs and angled bottles.  Stuffed toys and tiny socks.  I want DH and I to buy all of it ourselves, like some sort of stubborn symbol of our pride as parents.  "Look what we can do," I'd think.  "We can make a baby and give it everything it'll ever need. We take care of this baby without a registry."

I don't know why that idea matters so much in my mind, but it does.