One Good Week

There is one glorious week for me almost every month.  It's that perfect period of time when there is no waiting, no expectation.  It follows grief and precedes expectation.  That week is a wonderful break for me emotionally.  Sometimes I reflect during that time, but often I just enjoy the peace.

Grief, peace, anticipation (with a bit of impatience), disappointment and then grief again.  That's the basic cycle of my life, of our life.  My husband goes through it, too.

There are those rare months where we don't think about it.  From time to time our lives are so incredibly full that there's barely time to try to get pregnant, much less think about whether or not we are.  Those months are peaceful as well.

This month, I thoroughly enjoyed that week of peace.  It was a week of freedom for me.  Freedom from grief, freedom from anticipation, freedom to have nothing distract me from the moment of "now."  I love being in the "now" when it's peaceful.

When I'm not in that wonderful week, I still have peace.  It is buried a bit deeper and takes quite a bit more effort to draw from, but it's there.  Sometimes, I try to distract myself from the things that are distracting me from that deeper peace, and I find that my mind becomes so jumbled with thoughts and emotions that the pain of this journey becomes more difficult to bear.  I suppose it's similar to being in a place of denial.  I prefer the genuine peace.

I rely on my husband to help keep me grounded.  Or I try to.  I don't think I've done as well this month.  This month, things were different after that perfect week of peace than they've ever been.  I'm sure any of you dealing with infertility have experienced a month where your body did such weird stuff at every stage of the cycle that you had yourself, and maybe even your husband, convinced that you might actually be pregnant this time.

I've been dancing on that line this month.

This "month" is almost over for me.  My husband lovingly offered to buy a pregnancy test for me to take, just to quiet the uncertainty and calm my anxiety.  But I declined.  I've been able to tap into that deeper peace over the last few days (or perhaps I'm fooling myself and I'm simply distracted by our recent move).  Either way, I feel more equipped to handle a negative test result, or bodily signal that I'm not pregnant again than I did before.

So, dear friends, as I try to remember to keep my mind stayed on Him who gives perfect peace, I will also try to remember to pray that you will have that same, deep peace, even in the midst of pain.