Waiting for the second line

Waiting waiting waiting.
That’s all I’m doing, waiting
Waiting waiting waiting
Pink line!

(to the tune of Rawhide)

Anyway. Where was I? Right! Waiting.

I’ve never had much patience for waiting. In general, I’d rather try to forget what I’m waiting for, only to be surprised when the day actually arrives. Like getting my grades in college – it was pure agony to wonder how well I did, hoping that my final exam went better than I thought or that my professor liked my term paper more than I did. So I would completely put it out of my mind and focus on other things. I didn’t want to spend my life being anxious and nervous and worrying about something that would not be at all affected by my constant obsession. And mostly, I was successful.

The problem with the waiting now is that I get a daily (or twice-daily) reminder, when I go pee on my sticks. Sure, maybe I can forget for a few hours until lunchtime, and then a few hours more until dinnertime, but those constant reminders draw me back into that never-ending circle of thoughts and worries.

Especially because we’re down to the wire now, almost a year of trying. Each month has brought us closer to that invisible divide between fertile and infertile, and therefore each month has weighed heavier and heavier on my mind.

And despite my efforts to relax and de-stress, we’re down to the wire in another sense, in that according to my calculations, I expect my two matching pink lines to appear this week. It somehow seems like a test, like one of those final exams or term papers, where I know I have one last chance to get things right before I get a big fat F. And that somehow makes this cycle seem so much more important, so much more critical.

Because so much is riding on this week. It's not just the outcome of this cycle, this month, that matters … the outcome of this whole year is riding on what happens this week. This is the culmination of something big, no matter how much I might want it to be small.

I got to spend time with my niece and nephew this weekend. My niece is two weeks old. If L and I had conceived soon after starting trying, we’d have a two-week-old baby right now. It’s just amazing to me every time I think of that. Every time I think that in 9 months, my brother and his wife created a child, an entire miniature human being(!), and we have nothing. The stark difference between our situations is so harshly defined, so clearly laid out in black and white before me. It’s so tactile, so obvious, so real. There definitely nothing subtle about it.

I just know that one of these days, this blog will seem so whiny, so impatient, so silly. Is that too much to ask?


P.S. Pee stick update for the weekend - I was really bad about remembering to read the stupid things, so I ended up mostly leaving them way too long. But it was all no line at all, with one having a very faint line (whenI waited over an hour to read it). I'll update after lunch today.

Update: Extremely faint line - could have imagined it. Too early still.