an uneasy calm, cycle 3, day 17

There’s a certain calmness in this time – this in between time, after the doctor-mandated-sex but before the two-week-wait sets in, in earnest. The proverbial calm before the storm. Truthfully, I’ve never felt it before – not in the last two cycles and certainly not when I was trying unassisted, futile though it was.

But just yesterday, a kind of calm has settled over me. I want, with every fiber of my being, for this to be it – to be pregnant, to hold on to the gaggle of cells this time, to give birth to a healthy, gurgling babe. And at the same time, I feel almost liberated in my awareness and my (tacit, halting) acceptance that this very well might not be the one. That I could just as plausibly be again un-pregnant.

The last two rounds, the two-week-wait just felt like I was interminably holding my breath – I don’t think I exhaled until the blood work was in, and even then, only with great hesitation.  By contrast, today at least – and that’s to say nothing of tomorrow or the days ahead, during which I’m sure I will descend into the anxiety-ridden crevasse of usual – feels calm and accepting, a very unfamiliar peace. I’m not inventorying my stockpile of pregnancy tests or browsing through the designer nurseries on Apartment Therapy – or at least not as furiously. I know that I’ll be heartbroken if this cycle doesn’t work – it’s the one year mark of trying, it’s the last cycle of Clomid before we kick it up a notch and move to IUI, it’s one step closer to – on bad days – big conversations about how far we’ll take this, whether adoption is a possibility and all kinds of other overwhelming Big Questions.

But for today, I am – how, I’m not sure – calm.

(So that’s it. An entire post without a footnote, a strikethrough or a hyperlink – just me, getting kind of real, without sarcasm as my cover. But I’m not one for saccharine sentimentality. So let’s not make a habit of it.)