A Mess

Lately I'm just a mess jumble of emotions. Much like the unused balls of soft pastel baby yarns which sit jumbled next to an unfinished baby blanket along our couch. Every now and then the girls grab onto a string and pull it which leaves the balls slightly more undone than they were yet still intact.

I am a woman driven. By what I'm not entirely sure but I know exactly where I'm trying to go. Almost everything I have done since the moment I said goodbye to Eli has led me to this time, this place and I'm almost there. I can feel it. It is unnerving, exciting, exhausting and terrifying all at the same time. All of the work I have done to whip my body into shape, to lose the baby weight, to regain normalcy in my cycle has led to this. My last chance to have our last child. What once seemed eons away is now mere days or weeks hopefully. I'm so close to that goal that I'm almost losing focus, it's just too big. So much is at stake.

I have been pregnant six times and have three living children. I've been batting 50% before too and I've approached many of my last pregnancies with the knowledge that they could be my last (due to so many c-sections). I just keep telling my body that we can do this. I can do this. I need to do this for so many reasons, I'm sure more than even I realize. There will be no regrets, only jumbled yarn.

The Deja Vu Keeps Rolling

Warning: possible tmi here...but it's just too much to bottle up I suppose. Here I sit, thinking about this time one year ago. It was then that I got pregnant with Eli. It is far too easy to remember because this cycle started on the exact same day as last year's cycle. Something which I find inexplicable considering that in that year's time I had a baby. What are the odds that my cycle would begin the exact same day one year later? And, the day after my birthday both years. Unbelievable.

Not too long after I got pregnant my husband asked me if I was going to sell my fertility monitor because Eli was to be our last child. I vividly remember telling him not yet, that you never know. I also saved two pregnancy tests. It makes me wonder that perhaps I did know. That maybe if there is a next time I should purge it all, leave no questions, no doubts to linger. These are the kinds of things I remember.

Last Year

I have been pregnant six times, three living children, two lost to Potter's Syndrome at full-term and one lost to early miscarriage. While I have been pregnant six times, not all of those have come easily. I needed clomid to conceive our youngest daughter and I took progesterone supplements to regulate my hormones prior to conceiving Eli. That was last spring, this time of year. I've had the joy of nursing all of our daughters to at least a year. As a side note, that is one of the more painful things about losing my sons, the loss of being able to nurse them - even just one time. After nursing our youngest it took a long time for my body to return to normal and even then my hormones were out of whack. I wasted time and energy trying to explain this to a general practitioner who tested my thyroid and after it was determined to be normal he diagnosed me as depressed. My OB was more sympathetic and gave me prometrium when I explained that we would like to conceive in the summer. I took the prometrium for three months, immediately noticing a difference the first month (to which I'm sure my family sighed a collective hallelujah), and Eli was conceived the third month (the first that we tried). I had felt it was meant to be, in my heart I believed he was a boy and at the time that he would be our last child, the final link to our chain.

Last year, last spring, I was here. I wanted another child, we wanted another child. I was hoping my cycles would normalize and that in a few months we would be able to get pregnant. That is where I am now, except this time I am here after giving birth to that child. Now I am left to again wonder whether my body will cooperate, whether we will be able to conceive another child. The wait will be slightly longer, but not much. I hope to give just enough space between, for Eli. It feels too familiar and so wrong at the same time. I just went through this one year ago, how can I possibly be here again? In that time I got pregnant, carried a baby for nine months and am left as empty handed as when I started. Strangely, I find myself as hopeful as I was one year ago, undeterred by the events which have taken place since. In that I find solace. I know my spirit has yet to be broken.