Babies, babies everywhere...

...and not a one for me.

A girl I used to babysit had a baby boy today. I'm happy for her...really. I'm happy for all the girls at church who have just had babies or will be having babies in the next few weeks (and there are a LOT of them).

I'm also incredibly jealous of them, which I know is wrong. I'm depressed that I'm not among them. I'll even admit that I'm angry (at...Mike? ...men? ...God? ...myself?) that I'm not among them.

I know that nobody ever said that life was fair, but I hate that it's so blatantly UNfair sometimes. I LOVE babies...I love playing with them, holding them while they sleep, watching them grow up & develop personalities & learn new things...I love reading to them and singing to them and rocking them to sleep. I love getting to know them when they start talking and playing. I love taking care of them, even when they're sick or stubborn or screaming.

I've wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember. I'm thrilled...THRILLED...that things in my body have changed such that I CAN have children now. I'm glad that I didn't bear children for Mike...for the sake of the babies...that would have been awful for them. How could I have ever explained to them that their dad wasn't around because he's in jail for being involved with child pornography? What a terrible thing for them to live with! I'm glad, for their sake, that God stopped my cycle and packed an extra hundred pounds onto my body (so fast that I have stretchmarks) and in those ways prevented me from being able to get pregnant. But now that the first of those two has reversed, and the second is in the process of reversing, hope and desire have become mixed with this terrible sadness. I have the ability as far as my own body goes, but no husband. I don't even have any romantic prospects at this point.

My divorce recovery class is even depressing in that respect...all the other people in the class have kids already & none of them are young enough or interested in having kids in the future...and I keep hearing about how long it takes to recover from divorce and how they've all been so blessed to have kids & how divorce in some ways was a blessing in disguise because it gave them all this time on their own with the kids. I keep hearing people who've married again after divorce talk about how the ten years (somehow, they always say ten) between marriages was such a great time...I don't want to wait ten years. In ten years, I'll be 36 and nearing the end of the time when it's really safe to bear children, and what if we have trouble?

I HATE this. I hate feeling like this. I hate hope mixing with hopelessness. I hate getting choked up every time I hear about a new pregnancy or birth. I hate buying baby clothes and baby toys for a thousand other people. I hate that holding a baby now shoves a dagger into my heart and a knot into my throat, even though it puts a smile on my face.

I'm going to stop writing now, because I know that anything else to come from my fingertips will be more of the same stuff & if you know me at all, you know all of this anyway...but if you actually read this far, please pray for me.

Then & Now

I was looking through some photos today that my dad took two Christmases ago. I honestly have no memory of that Christmas...it was right after my divorce and everything was just a blur, even at that time, I'm sure. My dad was flipping through the pictures at the house one day & I saw one where I was opening a gift, there was a dog on the couch beside me, and David Johnson was behind me. The dog was one I'd completely forgotten about...my brother and I kept her for a little while, trying to find her a home. I'd totally forgotten that she spent Christmas with us. And David...I had no memory of his presence at all, for which I feel really bad, actually. But there they both were. I asked my dad to copy the file to my computer so I could look through the pictures at some point, and I finally did so today.

It's kinda nice to fill in some of the holes in my memory from that point in time. In most of the photos, I was smiling - something I doubt I did much of at that time. It's good to look back and see that I did still have SOME joy.

The other thing that struck me was how much I've changed physically since then. I know that weight isn't really important, but I do genuinely feel better being lighter...and despite what the scale has been telling me, I don't often realize the aesthetic change. Check it out:

Then

Christmas 2008

May or June 2009 - trying to figure out how to arrange my dress for Kat's wedding.

and Now

New Year's Eve, 2009 with Kat & Ashley

October 2009, in a dress that fits me even BETTER now :-D

What amazes me is that I didn't even try. The weight loss and the return of *something* that had been inexplicably absent for YEARS can only be attributed, in my mind, to a miracle. I honestly believe that while I was married to Mike, God purposely screwed up my body so that I would be unable to get pregnant...and now that all chances of Mike fathering my children are gone, so are the barriers to my having babies. Of course, this makes me all the more anxious to be a mom...but for now, I can at least appreciate the miracle of the ABILITY. I know that someday (hopefully very very soon) I'll find a guy that's RIGHT for me and loves me as much as I'm capable of loving him (because I know, very deeply now, how important that factor is!) and who will be a wonderful husband and father and now that I've gone into daydreams I'll shut up. :-)

Call me Charlotte...

When Mike and I went to Fort Worth, Kathy let me borrow the last three seasons of Sex and the City. Before that, I'd borrowed the first three from Anne. At one point (I don't remember which season,) Charlotte finds out that she only has a 15% chance of ever getting pregnant. When I watched that episode, it hit kinda close to home for me. It made me cry, but I was okay. Today, however, I watched the episode in which she does get pregnant. She also miscarries, and then manages to pull together the strength to go to a birthday party for Miranda's baby. Thankfully, Mike was outside doing yardwork, because I started sobbing. That's exactly what I feel like. When Natalie told me she was pregnant with Alexis, I cried all the way home. After Alexis' first birthday, I cried all the way home. When Jessie told me she was pregnant, I think I managed a smile, and then cried for the next solid hour, and for a week off and on after that, every time it popped into my head. I feel terrible that I can't show her that I'm happy for her, because I am...but I'm in so much pain. I just wish I could relax about it and accept it.

...and again...

ANOTHER of my friends is pregnant. Thankfully this time she's not a very close friend, or I'd be in a pretty deep pit right now. Again.

I'm going to make an appointment with my doctor as soon as I have any money at all.

Hello!

Well, I've had a blog for a while, but a few days ago, my friend Katherine invited me to hers, and I liked the layout SO much better than the one I've had on Xanga, so I switched. Today seems like a fitting day to start, too, because today is a special day for me :-)

Mike and I were married three years ago today. Those three years have flown by so quickly...it's really difficult to believe that it has been that long! We're about to start on another adventure~ one that I've been looking forward to for as long as I can remember. I've wanted a baby ever since I was a baby myself, and Mike, finally, feels ready. He told me so just a few days ago, with no prompting from me, and I've been on Cloud 9 ever since! I'd started to worry that we'd be unable to have kids, since we've never used any kind of protection against pregnancy, and I still am worried, but I never had the impression that he was, too. It was a battle I was essentially fighting alone, because none of my friends have problems there. On Sunday, though, our congregation had a Baby Blessing, where all the families with new babies were gathered in front and prayed over. It's a special day, but it's always been hard for me. I'd finally come to a slightly unstable peace with the idea that I may never give birth to a child, so I thought I'd be alright, but I hadn't taken into account how much I miss Alexis, my friend Natalie's baby, who I've been babysitting for since she was born. They just moved to Houston, and I took it pretty hard. Normally, during the baby blessings, I join the rest of the congregation, gathering around the new babies to pray, but I just grabbed Mike's hand and told him that I'd lose it if I went up there. He stayed with me. On the way home, he suggested that we start looking into adoption, which completely blew me away. He said that he was getting worried about the possibility of us being infertile, but that now he feels ready to be a dad, and he wants to start soon. He finally wants a baby! I'm still hoping for pregnancy, but we're exploring our other options. Please pray that we'll start our family soon!

I've also been out of college for six months now, and that's hard to process, too, I guess because I'm still living in Searcy. I'm really having fun, though...my dad and I opened a little gift shoppe just off the town square~ the Serendipity Shoppe! It's an all-day-every-day job, but it's relaxed and I really do have fun. From time to time, I'll probably post little updates on here when we get in new inventory or something, but I'm not particularly advertising. This is part of my life now, and I want my friends to know what's going on!

Well...that's where my life is right now...I'll *try* to keep this updated!