Time to tell the tale of a very brief chapter in our lives. Very brief, but very important.

“No bueno?” I asked the woman holding the evidence of our future in her hands as she scanned my uterus with her magic wand.

…”No bueno,” She replied, not meeting my eye.

….Girl, I knew. I knew a week ago when the spotting started that was different that the spotting I had with OG.

“This is the only part of your job you don’t like, isn’t it?” I said.

She just handed me the tissues. Nothing else she could do. Nothing anyone could do.

 

How do you go from “OMG, TWO UNDER TWO?!” –

– to the awkward, uncomfortable “I’m SO sorry for your loss”…

How do you adapt from being annoyed that:

When you are trying to schedule your new pregnancy maintenance appointments and ultrasounds that: not 1, not 2, but THREE different people at different times in the process made comments such as,

“WOW, you have a 6 month old!??” or

“We just saw you for your ultrasounds, you’re pregnant again?!” and

“So I guess we can take the birth control pills off your list of current medications HAHAHAHA?”

or acquaintances in your life proclaiming:

“OMG I can’t imagine having them that close, mine are 7 years apart thank God”

or people asking bluntly:

“Were you trying again so quickly!?”

or my absolute favorite:

..”So… are you going to keep it?”

No buddy, I’m telling you I’m pregnant so I can text you later, “PSYCH!”. I work at Planned Parenthood, this is true. And it becomes more and more evident to me every day the misconceptions that people in my life, even close friends and family have about PP. For the record, just because I work there, and vehemently support their mission, if that means that you assume that I (or many of the women I work with) would personally have an abortion or even consider it (barring unforeseen horrific circumstances vis a vis rape, etc), you are very, very mistaken. Just because I believe in a woman’s right to choose doesn’t mean that I didn’t respect the miracle of a sperm and an egg meeting inside MY uterus under conditions that basically rendered this pregnancy immaculately conceived. I’m allowed to have my own personal beliefs, without the ridiculous idea that my opinion should be the law of the land for everyone. And I would never force my own moral standards onto someone with different standards. The fact that the heart of the political divide in this country boils down to this particular point will always baffle me.

Ok now back to my story:

And it even happened close to home…. my sweet husband had to deal with my insanity, and my hormones, and my worries head on… and perhaps it came out more blunt than he meant it to, but after having to hear my vocalized fears and concerns about how I was going to be able to handle this new addition in our lives, his utterance of:

“It doesn’t even seem like you want to have this baby”…

Well that didn’t feel so grand.

And then how do you go from feeling: completely overwhelmed, and scared, and laying awake at night crying trying to picture how on earth you are going to keep your shit together enough to manage another baby on top of the one you already have and already can’t handle – to starting to be a little bit excited and then feeling like you really actually got lucky to have it happen this way, and to start imagining what life is going to be like with 2 little kids who will always have a buddy to play with, and then being actually so happy to be going on another chubbo preggo carnival ride … to then suddenly feeling completely devastated that the pregnancy you hadn’t planned for and was so stressed about but then now were actually really excited about had… ended?

Here’s how – you just do. Now I’m a big fan of the pity party. I love a good wallow as much as the next person. But pity parties and wallowing get you nowhere but exactly where you started, and life is too short to be wasting energy and time on feeling sorry for yourself. Looking back, I realized that I had spent far too much time and effort worrying about the pregnancy and having to take care of two babies, because in the end none of those concerns I had even needed to be addressed. So when I found out the pregnancy ended, I made myself a deal: you may indulge in the fattest, juiciest, wallow you would like, but only for one night. And after that one delicious, delightful, sorrowful wallow, you must straighten up and business as usual. And that’s exactly what I did. No amount of woe is me-ing would change the outcome of what we were going through, and at the end of the day – this wasn’t that big of a deal. It was a pregnancy that was not supposed to continue, and so it didn’t. Millions of women all over the world go through this every day, and maybe it is not quite Kosher to say this out loud, but all evidence points to miscarriage being a blessing in disguise, from a scientific vantage point. My body recognized something was wrong, and I would prefer what we went through a million times over compared to having to go through a loss at a later point in pregnancy, or perhaps even more devastating – continue a pregnancy to term only to give birth to a baby who due to medical abnormalities could not survive.

So that’s that! Veni, vidi, vici. Well rather, he came, and no one really conquered. But we are stronger from this experience… and we were freaking rock solid to begin with.  #marriagegoals  #parentsoftheyear #passthebeer

So here is the photo montage of the month and a half where we were getting ready to be parents of 2. And maybe someday we will be, but this time the universe had a different plan.

In other news, besides the bummer part, we’ve had such a fun past few months. We celebrated Mother’s Day with brunch in Milwaukee, and a few weeks later with a surprise trip to Green Bay for the night to get away together and to let me go crazy on the slot machines at the casino. Of course I won nothing… Gates however had the envy of the real seasoned slot ladies when he won some jackpots on his first spin at the nickel slots, and they stopped smoking for a few minutes to regard him with jealousy and contempt. We went out for a delicious 3 course meal and ate ourselves into a food coma, and then slept like the dead at our hotel. Spending time alone was wonderful, although damn stupid babies for being stuck on your mind and making you miss them like crazy, no matter how desperate you were to get a break.

I also went up to Rapids with OG for Mother’s Day weekend, with a bearded surprise in my trunk after my brothers had the amazing plan to surprise our mom with a visit from us including the long lost now Texan James. A wonderful weekend.

We went to Hayward for this year’s Memorial Weekend bash and it was just as interesting being the sober sal of the group as it was last year. Luckily, 2 of the other girls are pregnant so they were also rocking the LaCroix. Unluckily, we hadn’t announced the pregnancy to most of the group yet so I got to play a fun game called How Well Can I Fool Everyone Into Assuming I’ve Been Drinking So As To Keep Them In The Dark. I won the game, hard. Carrying the same empty beer can around for 4 days straight and slyly pouring my new favorite sparkling water into it worked like a charm.

That White Peach doe! YUM!

Next up was Father’s Day, and we brought Papa Bear to a dairy breakfast out in Watertown. OG enjoyed her first tastes of pancakes and ice cream, stared down some cows, and we both gave Gates some slobbery kisses.

What else is new, what else is new… OG is THIS close to crawling so I put a kiddie pool up in the living room with blankets and such to keep her little squiggle butt contained… It is working swimmingly. HAHAHA!

She also has developed quite the little diva pants attitude and will LET YOU KNOW when she is not thrilled with whatever you are doing. For instance – other baby touched her ear:

And here we are mad as hell that we are in the bath:

She will also mean mug you if you are eating a snack that doesn’t involve her. And smack her lips and pant and wave her little hands around. This usually results in me giving her a bite of whatever I am having, so she really has this figured out.

BUT, the most wonderful, amazing, spectacular thing ever happened with Miss Squid… literally the day I started miscarrying, Olivia started sleeping through the night. All those times people would talk about how they just couldn’t stop themselves from sitting and staring at their snoozing babe I thought they were on crack… One time after I laid her in her crib after hours of rocking and crying (both of us) I started to walk away and my knee made a small little popping noise she startled awake like a firework went off and started hollering again… yea we just never really had ever had that  “peaceful sleeping baby experience”… well now I get it. For the first time in 8 months we have been able to just unwind at night instead of anxiously sitting on the couch, too scared to even breathe deeply and risk relaxing for a second because we knew within minutes we would hear the screeching… Now we spend adult time together (turning on the TV and then I fall asleep hard in about 6 minutes after laying down on the couch around 8 pm). And she has started to get super, super, adorably, sweetly, amazingly snuggly and it is seriously the best thing. It feels so wonderful to be wanted by this little slug just because she needs a cuddle, and not because she is hysterically demanding that my chest immediately drop whatever it is doing and fulfil her hunger. I like her so much better than I used to! Is that a terrible thing to say? Oops.

Keep up the good work OG!

Oh little peanut, you really do make life fun!

PS: back on the sauce. Always trying to look on the sunny shandy side of life!