I've always been so thankful for the year I was born. Seems like a
weird thing to be grateful for, but I've always been so blessed in
friendships, work, and life in general and a lot of it seems to be a
result of great timing. In addition to the wonderful people I've met in
my life because I was in the right place at the right time, I've also
had some other benefits from being born in 1982. For example, my career
in particular seemed to be greatly helped by the timing of my graduation
from college. I graduated at the time before it became challenging for
teachers to get jobs. If I'd been born any later, a finding a job
would've been a little more challenging and certainly I wouldn't have
gotten my dream job at VHEW. Basically, I've always just marveled that,
in my life, things just happen at the right time. It all seems so
miraculous looking out on how the last (almost) 30 years of my life have
played out. I might not have agreed with this whole "perfect timing
notion" as much in those few years between when I'd decided that I
wanted to marry Brandon and when he actually proposed, but in hindsight
even that timing makes sense to me now.
For those of you
who know me, I'm a planner. I've done everything in a "typical" order. I
went to high school/college, got a job, got my masters, found the love
of my life, bought a house, worked on my National Boards, got engaged,
went back to school again, planned a wedding, got married and went on my
honeymoon. Since I got my first job, there hasn't been a semester or
summer when I wasn't doing something whether it be going to school at
night/online or planning a wedding. I've always longed for a semester
when I had nothing to do when I got home from work. However, after the
"honeymoon was over" this summer I had a few days when I was left with
nothing to do and I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with it, like I had
nothing left to contribute, at least not until it was time to have
kids. But you know the saying, "You only want what you can't have?" Once
we got home and settled in after the wedding and honeymoon suddenly the
urgent need to start a family didn't seem so urgent. I declared to
everyone that I was now wanting to wait to try until June next year. In
fact, last Sunday we went to see The Dark Knight Rises and our friends unexpectedly walked into the theater. She is expecting a baby
boy in November so it's visible that she has a "bun in the oven."
They ended up sitting next to us in the movies and she made the
comment, "You need to get pregnant soon so we can plan some play dates."
That sounded great, but, like I said, I'd very recently come to terms
with the idea that waiting until next summer would be more responsible,
so I responded with, "Maybe next summer, but we're just not ready right
now." However, just like the timing of my engagement wasn't as timely as I
had once wished for, the timing of children wasn't for me to decide
either. Apparently,
while my brain was worried that I was running out of things to do, my
body was hard at work creating something to keep me busy...
During
the movie, I noticed that she was rubbing her baby bump
and, as I'm sure it would for all girls, it got me thinking about when I
would have a baby bump of my own. Even though I knew we had decided to
wait, my heart overrode my brain and during the movie I succumbed to
fantasies about being pregnant myself. I've always wanted to get
pregnant in the summer so that the baby would be due during spring and I
would take off the last bit of school and still have summer off to
spend with a newborn before going back in August. During the movie, I
calculated when we'd be due if we started trying now and I was pleased
to realize that the timing still worked out with my spring/summer plan.
Still, I knew Brandon would never consent to that..."not right now,"
he'd say. I reflected over some symptoms I'd been having lately: tired
feeling (I just thought I was being lazy after spending so much time on
vacation), relentless hunger (possible a stomach ulcer?), and some other
symptoms I had just assumed were signs that I'd get that "sign" we were
not pregnant very soon (somehow it hadn't occurred to me that I was
already very late on getting that "sign"). When Brandon & I got in
the car, I decided to tell him about these weird feelings I was all of a
sudden having. I turned to him and said, "I think I caught pregnancy
from our friend." He chuckled, but soon asked for more specifics and became
frustrated that I could all of a sudden just think I'm pregnant out of
the blue. His frustration was understandable...why hadn't I said
anything til now? Well, I really didn't stop to put all the pieces
together, but sitting next to her made me think about some things
going on with my body since we'd returned from the honeymoon.
By the time we'd gotten home from the movies, I was convinced that I was being a
bit dramatic (after all, you can't just "catch" pregnancy from your
neighbor in the movie theater, right?). However, I had still decided
that a test was in order. The goal? To prove I was not pregnant so we
could move on with the evening. Was I successful at saving the evening?
Not exactly. Immediately a vertical line appeared on the test...a line
that should not be there. I rushed out to show Brandon so he could
convince me I must be reading the test wrong. I kept looking at the key
and then back at the results...PREGNANT. Brandon (being a typical man),
did not understand that there are rarely false positives so he rushed
out to CVS and proceeded to buy a variety of tests ("Be sure to get the
ones with the words on it!" I called out). Sure enough, two more tests
produced the same results (even the fancy, expensive one with words -
"Pregnant").
Time since then has slowed down considerably. We feel
unbelievably blessed since we thought conceiving would be challenging
due to my one ovary and PCOS. I keep telling Brandon that I've
always heard "If you wait til you're ready to have kids, then you'll
never have kids." While at first this little blessing seemed like it
didn't go along with our perfectly timed life plan, what we've realized in the past few days is that no matter how much we
like to plan things we have a destiny that plays out in ways we can't
always predict. Everything is unfolding as it should.
