The other night I woke up from a dream where I vividly remember all of my bottom teeth crumbling out of my mouth. I had been unpredictably nauseous for nearly 24 hours prior and was a day late for my period. I just knew I was pregnant.
As the day advanced, my nausea increased while I was frantically trying to figure when/how conception happened along with brainstorming how I was going to tell my husband that I was going to take a pregnancy test. We had been so careful. I wrapped my mind over so many details of this new pregnancy. I was googling to make sure nausea/morning sickness symptoms could happen this early and I was trying to calculate my due date.
Twelve hours later I started my period.
Sigh.
A sigh of relief released from me for my husband who really wants to wait a few more months before trying, and a sigh of disappointment for myself thinking that my body was carrying another unexpected miracle.
I really believed I could have been pregnant. I wish I was.
I am a planner by nature—as much as I want to think of myself as a “go with the flow” type of person, I’m not. I like plans. I envision all my goals/hopes/dreams and work towards making it all a reality. I like to know the route before I drive somewhere new, and I get anxious when I have to take a detour or when my GPS recalculates. I prep and plan for all scenarios; I over-think and under-sleep, and I worry all the time that I should be doing more.
I am so blessed to be a mom and I’m beyond blessed that my daughter Arielle is my daughter. She’s my dream come true and more than I could have ever hoped for. With her, I am full and fulfilled. Should it be in God’s plan that I do not have another child, I will be ok and remain grateful. However, my heart does know I have more love to give and for the past 2 years, I’ve been wanting to make a plan for Baby #2.
My husband and I think differently in many ways. I focus on the big picture—like I already envision hosting holiday dinners with our grown children and their significant others around our table (note our daughter is 3 years old). And my husband focuses on the present day moment—like how we are just finally getting out of changing diapers and finally starting to sleep through the night. He’d like to enjoy this for a bit.
I worry so often about how I’m in my 30s and my biological clock is ticking, while he reminds me of how young I am and how so-and-so just had a baby in her late 40s.
I talk about how our kids will have a big age gap and he mentions how his coworker talks about his young kids close in age fighting all the time.
I worry that if we wait to have Baby #2, there will be no possibility for #3 or #4. While he is hardcore set on Baby #2 being the last one for us so timing is not as important.
My husband is the realist of our family by focusing on the cost of raising a child with a quality childhood and financing their education. Totally respectable.
I am the dreamer by focusing on how I can love and raise amazing people and help them pursue their passion/purpose. I would adopt more children in a heartbeat if we were on the same page and didn’t need to worry about finances.
I like to talk about goals and plans in advance, while my husband prefers to wait to talk about something major (like having another baby) until we are “ready” for that conversation.
Neither of us is right or wrong in the way we think, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit my frustration with the lack of a plan in place for the past couple years.
It’s a delicate conversation because you don’t want to nag and you don’t want to push your partner into something as important as raising another human, before your partner is wholeheartedly onboard.
We’ve had many conversations about how we both feel. We both want another child at some point and I finally have the closest thing to an estimated TTC start date which is “at the end of the year”.
In my mind, we’re closer to the end of the year now than we are to Jan 2020, so when I thought I could be pregnant, it was a welcomed surprised. We’ve been so careful as we are not TTC, but when we can open the floodgates ( lol) I’m ready!
While I’ve been marking my cycle through an app and trying to eat better and drink more water etc., I know that it may not be as easy as simply deciding we are ready. Biology and God come into play, and as much as I badly want control over the situation, I know I simply do not. That’s the part that scares me about continuing to wait to try to conceive—it could happen right away or it could take years.
A really close friend of mine has been trying to get pregnant with her first baby for over a year, while a ton of my friends are waiting a few more years. There is no formal timeline we need to adhere to and motherhood will and does look different for every single one of us. My journey is exactly as it should be. I need to repeat this line and make it my mantra…My journey is exactly as it should be.
As a planner, I worry that it may be crazy to attempt to get pregnant during a pandemic, and as a furloughed worker, my employment future isn’t clear. Sometimes being realistic or practical stops us from doing the things our heart is yearning for, but at the end of the day, I worry most about regret.
Goodness, these are some late night thoughts strung together into a rambling blog, so I guess I’ll end with this:
Whenever you may be in your journey—trust that you are doing a good job. You are navigating life which does not have clear directions. The GPS often recalculates and sometimes we run out of gas or we try to speed through that yellow light telling us to slow down. We keep moving and the journey continues. I need to remind myself that while I know a specific destination is going to be amazing, there are some pretty great views along the way too.
