Yesterday offered up a flashback. Today I’m paying for it, so to speak. It has been months since I last recorded my cycle on a calendar. It was once mandatory for me to mark a date on a calendar hidden inside a kitchen cabinet. Even after my hyperactive efforts at conception no longer dominated my life, my calendar addiction continued. It was the last vestige of my once robust regimen monitoring all aspects of my reproductive health.
Then somehow in the last little while I forgot to circle a date. It was a bit liberating when I realized it. I’d lost count. How could that be? A few more days went by and I forgot again to take some time to piece together some history. Then I woke up to find Pamela Anderson and I had more in common than our first names. Hmm. I allowed myself to enjoy the possibility that something more was behind my enlarged bust. I must, at some point, get serious about analyzing the past 30-60 days I told myself on my commute to the office. Then I forgot again distracted by a project that was more pressing.
Later in the day I remembered to call up a calendar online. I started counting. For a glorious five minutes — the equivalent of a pregnant pause — I was convinced it had been 50 days, not 26. Fireworks went off inside my heart. It was a flashback to what my months, hoping against hope, used to be like. I instinctively rubbed my belly. I actually allowed myself to count ahead nine months. I wanted desperately to believe that a miracle had occurred. My mind raced. I knew I still had a pregnancy kit stuffed into the back of a bathroom cabinet. Was it possible that I might for the first time in my life see two pinks lines??
Doubt took hold. I looked again at the calendars now printed out on my desk. Was it possible I had had such an innocuous last cycle that it went unrecorded even in my head? I decided to wait until the morning to search out the pee stick. It all seemed to good to be true.
And it was. At 3:30 a.m. my uterus woke me up. It felt like a nuclear war was being waged. There was no way I was going to be able to fall back to sleep without a large dose of Aleve. I dragged myself out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom in search of my painkillers and for the next hour waited until the war was downgraded to a skirmish. My mind turned off and mercifully I fell asleep.
The skirmish continues this morning and with it a realization of how much my heart still wants to believe.
June 1, 2007 4:53 pm
I always feel like someone is pulling some horrible joke when I find myself having a freak moment of hope like that. It happens to the best of us, despite all efforts to remain stalwart and uneffected. I’m so sorry your heart was tugged around like that. Sucks every time…*hugs*
June 1, 2007 5:43 pm
Hey lady, POAS!!! I had worse cramps with pregnancy than I did with my periods and my period cramps were BAD!
June 1, 2007 9:25 pm
I appreciate your unshakeable faith in the impossible, but it’s without a doubt AF.
June 1, 2007 6:17 pm
I agree with Deanna: it sucks that your heart got tugged like that! We will be forever hopeful, till the day we die. It’s part of who we are, and what we’re made of. We’re strong (if we keep on saying that, we will HAVE to start believing it some day soon won’t we?) and part of being strong is having hope. Whether that hope is for a child or just for getting up and moving on, we won’t let go of it…
June 1, 2007 7:11 pm
How could you not still want to believe when I was desperately wanting to believe as I read this? Some habits are hard to break. But would you want to?
June 1, 2007 7:55 pm
Hope and Belief always linger don’t they? I have had cycles where it would take an immaculate conception to produce two lines on a pee stick and yet hope is there.
June 1, 2007 10:00 pm
Like DD said, habits are hard to break 🙁
*Hugs*
June 2, 2007 12:02 am
Oh, man, I hate that. Even when I don’t have sex, I still can’t help myself but hope when AF is a little slow in coming. Dreading menopause, when even that little flicker of hope will be snuffed out.
June 2, 2007 2:04 pm
Oh I do so hate that. The moment of hope is so exciting, to have it taken away is so very hard.
June 2, 2007 11:36 pm
Hope knows how to cling. It seems our past troubles like to flare up from time to time, just when we think they’ve gone quiet for good. And I’m sorry you didn’t get that miracle outcome.
Bea
June 3, 2007 3:16 am
I went through the same damn thing this morning…AF decided to delay her visit again…and that HOPE that creeps in is just so amazing…and then your uterus wakes you up. Lovely ain’t it? Im sorry you had a rude awakening…