holding my breath

I apologize for the long silence--I've been working on some things and have been hesitant to talk about them. I'm still totally hesitant, but if I'm going to continue to push myself to write--to write about things in my life--I have to eventually break the silence.

The good news is that today, I am pregnant. I don't know if it will continue (please, please, please...) because the usual suspects have turned up over the past few weeks: bleeding, cramping, absence of symptoms, etc. It's been a stressful few weeks. But as of now and according to my current midwife, I am still hesitantly pregnant. 9 weeks. I noticed the missed period at the end of ICLW in January and thought little of it, started bleeding (what else could it be?), and then stopped all of a sudden. Strange. POAS and sure enough: pregnant. Since then, it's been more blood, more weirdness, and yet all signs still point to me being pregnant. The next chance I get to know anything will be in three weeks when I have the NT Scan (again: please, please, please...).

I wanted to get pregnant, so this is a very welcome surprise. We had been not preventing, but not trying, either. Remember: my infertility problem is NOT trouble getting pregnant. It's trouble staying pregnant. So when I saw the positive test, I think my heart sank a little bit because I assumed that this was doomed from the start. Way to be hopeful, huh? And yet it's persisted, like the little train who could. So far, so good.

I'm tentative, though, and like the first successful pregnancy that ended in my son W, I can't imagine I'll truly feel pregnant until about 24 weeks. That's when I started to let myself believe it would work out then, and even 24 weeks is no guarantee. I hate that I know so much. I wish I could be a happy pregnant woman.

That said, I have actually told people IRL already, but only close friends. Ones to whom I've also said: I'm prone to miscarriage, so I'm pregnant now and don't know if I'll be pregnant next time I see you. I've promised them (and myself) that if my status changes, I'll call or email to avoid the awkward "How ARE you?" said with a big smile if there is nothing left to smile about. I've decided that I'd rather talk about the miscarriage possibility openly than to hide alone in my house, scared to mention what I'm going through.

I don't think I'll even talk much about it here, though it might make an appearance because it is part of my life, one way or another. I hope there is more going on than just this, however, and I'd like to talk about that stuff (like Wisconsin, my current teaching woes, W and how amazed I am at his developing intelligence and personality, family, the messiness of our kitchen right now....see I have a life outside of TTC!). So this will NOT turn into a pregnancy blog, and I also hope it does not turn into a blow-by-blow of my miscarriage. It will hopefully be what it's always been (in its short life): a blog about a complicated person who is trying to figure out what she has to say to the world. And now, I need to go take a long nap. Thanks for checking back in after all this time!