Normal (?) life

Last week was an emotional roller coaster. I cried, I laughed, I cried some more. Josh and I smiled and got all sorts of excited to share our good news with everybody we knew.  We talked a lot and prayed a lot. We have felt overwhelmingly hopeful and thankful. I want to celebrate every day, but I'm not really sure that being able to take a pill every day is worth celebrating. To me it sure feels like it.

When I talked to my sisters and my mom, they all asked the same question: "how sick will the medication make you?" My response? "hopefully very sick. For about 9 months. And then sleep deprived for 20-something years....that's the goal anyway." 

I've now filled the perscription and started taking it and it makes me a little sick. My Dr. told me to ease into it and "work up to 3 times per day" because "it'll make you feel like crap". So, maybe it's all psychological. Maybe the women in my family freaked me out unnecessarily. Maybe I'm a hypochondriac. No matter the reason, yes, I feel sick. Mostly just nauseated, and I puke for no apparent reason in the middle of a meal on a fairly regular basis. 

I'd be lying if I said my first thought wasn't "pregnant ladies always puke in the middle of their meals". I'd also be lying if I said I didn't think that every time I felt the least bit ill over the past 2 1/2 years. Any time I've any symptom of pregnancy (which I know all about because I saw How to Deal and the girls are reading the pregnancy symptoms out loud to each other "heightened sense of smell, nausea, breast tenderness, strange cravings") I've secretly thought "maybe that means I'm pregnant" which is never the case for me. But, this time it's different.

You see, since "coming out of the closet", I've heard more "we struggled to get pregnant too" stories than "nourishandstrengthenus,dousthegoodweneed"'s from Josh since we started praying together(that's a lot in case you were wondering....).

It seems that a lot of them end like this "just when we'd given up trying, we were on our way to the adoption agency to fill out papers so I decided to take one last pregnancy test...." or "we'd been told time after time that we couldn't have kids, and we had finally let it go and decided to enjoy out time together instead when I decided to just use that last pregnancy test in my closet instead of throwing it away...." or "it's funny, but I found out I was pregnant because I'd decided to go back on the pill since we weren't really ready for kids just yet and used my only remaining test...." Of course the "..." is invariably "and it came up positive!"

I keep telling Josh that if we could just decide we don't want kids, or start the adoption process tomorrow, or plan an international trip for 9 months in the future that maybe that would trigger in me whatever it seems to trigger in every other woman on the planet. 

So tonight, secretly (ok, I put it on my blog, the only people it's really a secret from here are my mom and Josh...) I hope I'm baby-sick and not pill-sick. Secretly I hope that by going to the Dr. and starting some meds it had that mystery "let it go and it will come" effect on me. Secretly I want to not have to go through this treatment and worry that it won't work on me. Secretly I hope that by pretending to move on with our lives, we tricked whatever it is that's stopping our family from growing.

On the other hand, I (not so) secretly hope that when we went to the Dr. last week, there was some spirit child jumping for joy and singing our praises that we finally did what it takes to get a body ready for them to join us.