I started this blog back in February 2016. I promptly abandoned it shortly after. Blogs seem like a great place to express yourself but being a millenial I know just how vast the internet is and how many voices are out there that never get to be heard. Starting a blog in 2016 feels like showing up to a party so late that everyone's already in various stages of drunkness and inside-joke-sharing-ness. Anyways, I started this blog to write to an imaginary baby that I honestly believed would never exist. I had no idea as I ditched the blog that my life would change just two months later, and I wouldn't find out about that change until September.

September ___. After months of avoiding pregnancy tests (that test line had been absent far too many times for me to continue taking HPTs), I decided on a whim to stop at Walgreens. Not sure what led me to the 'home planning' aisle, my self defense mechanisms had already kicked in. Expecting another letdown, I thought to myself, I'll grab a bag of chips on the way out. I'll drown my sorrows in a bag of chips. I've earned that much.

When I got home, I unwrapped the pack of tests. Decided to take the regular one and save the digital for the next time I thought I could be pregnant. Something about the finality of the 'NO' on the digital was too much to bear that day, not even a bag of chips would soften that kind of blow. The amount of error'd tests I'd gotten over the years taught me that my pee stream must be super shitty or something so I grabbed the most disposable looking cup in the kitchen (see Tony, hoarding the Italian Ice cups had its uses after all!) and headed to the bathroom. I did my thing, dipped the test in, and waited.

Normally, I pee and run. I'm a pee & runner. PNR. I don't want to anxiously sit there the three minutes you're supposed to wait. This time something made me sit there and watch. I didn't have to watch very long before a big, bright, bold, beautiful, BANGIN (alliteration, y'all) POSITIVE LINE showed up. Within SECONDS, y'all. The pee was still working its way across the window and I had a positive. I was like um no? No? That's not what's supposed to happen, I'm supposed to wait three minutes, see nothing, hold it up to various lighting, break the test open to look at the actual strip, examine it from every angle, see the indention line and get all excited and then get sad, then finally give up. My immediate thought was actually "Oh, it must be broken? This isn't right." followed by repeated sobs of "No....no....nonononono...." I kept sobbing NO, and kept shaking my head. I didn't realize it but I ended up on the floor somehow and ten minutes later I had had a full conversation with myself on how this can't possibly be. Illogical. I had never seen a positive pregnancy test in my entire life. In four years of taking tests every once in a while, two of which were testing more than once a month for the entire two years, I had never seen a positive. I didn't allow myself to be happy. I was terrified. Here it was, the thing I had literally dreamed about for years. Here it was, the only thing I had ever wanted in my entire life. When you tell yourself it probably will never happen, your brain gets all stupid and actually thinks you'll never get it. So yeah. I cried a lot and then called the only person I knew would answer on the first ring. This was a coworker and friend of mine who knew of my troubles and knew how negative I was about the whole thing. I said, "There's two lines on this test." She heard, "There's two pipes in my chest." Complete with scream-sobs, she seriously thought I had called her in my final moments of life while I lay tangled in a mess of twisted metal and pipes and who knows what else. I managed to laugh through the sobs and repeated myself...and we both kind of sat there in shock, crying, talking at an inhuman speed as girls do...how would I tell Tony? It was a Wednesday, his late day in the lab, so I had to wait extra long to tell him. In the meantime I called my doctor who got me in that same day to do a blood test.

You always wonder how you'll tell your husband the news, and how he'll take it. Tony is a logical person. As much as I am the left side of the human brain, he is the right side. It's a good balance for us. For all my passion and emotions and creativity, he is the formulaic, common sense, problem solving side. He can't help himself, sometimes he is sooooo logical that it turns into a bad thing. So we had talked about what this moment would be like, and he said that he would try not to just fly into a manic state of budgets and numbers. He said he would try not to dampen the moment. I knew he wouldn't react great to a super thought-out Pinterest worthy pregnancy reveal. I texted him about a billion times asking if he could get off early, and no of course he could not. That should've been his first clue. When I picked him up I was beaming in the most stupid way. I tried to keep a straight face which of course made it worse. He asked what I was smiling about and I tried to play it off like I had gone to a really great lunch with my friends and he missed out. I knew he wasn't fully convinced but by the time we got home I was a nervous wreck. I had him sit on the couch. I told him he knew something was up and he was right. Asked him to close his eyes. I rummaged through my purse and placed the test in his hands. I think he knew, because he opened his eyes the second it touched him and despite my husband being the logical, educated, degree-holding man he was, he was shocked. He asked me, "....but...what? How?" He was dazed, surprised (which he never is), and incredibly happy!

We tried to play it cool while we waited for the blood results. I even took that dreaded digital test the next morning which of course error'd. Fuck those things, seriously ladies. Stick with the regular tests. I dragged Tony out of bed at 5am to run to Walmart to get more tests. Didn't matter that we would know one way  or another by the end of the day. I needed to see those pink lines again. And I did. The regular was positive. The new digital test even said 'YES' which is just as defining and bold and unforgiving as the 'NO' I had seen so many times. I waited around forever and the nurse called to say hey, yeah, you're knocked up. They estimated that I may be around 8 weeks along based off of my HcG number which was around 21,000. Whatttt! That's a great number! Then! They said we could come in that SAME DAY to get an ultrasound. Oh my gosh, okay, I guess? Tony managed to get out of work for the last-minute ultrasound and I'm so glad he did. We went in thinking okay, maybe we will hear a heartbeat? Nah, y'all. They started with a transvaginal ultrasound and the second the thing was lubed up and inside me, she whipped it back out quickly and looked a little weird. Then she called another nurse in. They smeared the jelly on my stomach instead and BAM. My life. It was never the same.

I clenched Tony's hands so hard. I lost my breath. I blinked in disbelief. Then I cried. Our baby was there, a real baby, and yes, there was the heartbeat. I wasn't 8 weeks. I wasn't 12 weeks. I was 16 weeks pregnant and in the same ten minute window that I even knew there was a baby inside of me, they said they knew the gender already. They asked if we wanted to know. There was no hesitation, we shared a look and said yes. We were having a girl. The baby I saw on the screen moving, kicking, heart fluttering, that was our daughter. The shock was just unreal. As I type this at 22 weeks, she kicks me every once in a while like yep, I'm here. We had spent so many years hoping and dreaming we would have a baby. I had dreamed about it since I was a little girl, actually, and although I would have loved this baby either way, every single dream I'd ever had of my baby, it had been a girl. It's what I always pictured myself with, always knew I would be a good mother to a baby girl. It's like all the years we waited just melted away and I had perfect clarity of why everything in my life had ever happened. It was all for this moment.

I cried so much in the weeks between that appointment and me writing this blog post 5 weeks later. While the best thing in my life was growing away in my belly, I, unknowing, had had a rough couple months personally. I was in a seriously depressed state. I have had anxiety for about 8 years, but in the days before I found out I was pregnant, my anxiety was at an all time high. I actually had a full blown panic attack maybe a week before the positive test. Before it had always been a creeping, sickening feeling that kept me up at night, made me cry myself to sleep, made me wake Tony at 4am because I couldn't make it go away. Then one night I was at my lowest point in years. Some small issue set off my sadness, except this time it snowballed. Within ten minutes I was worked up into hyperventilation. Past the point of controlling it with breathing exercises or a distraction like my normal routine. Something in me broke, and I experienced the scariest moments of my life. For over three hours, I hyperventilated, close to blacking out, went past crying and sobbing to actual drawn out screams, deep unfulfilling gasps for air, rocking back and forth, throwing myself into my pillow to try to shake myself out of it, clinging to Tony as hard as I could. I had lost control of everything. I probably got very close to a heart attack. The chest pain hurt more than anything in my life. Deep stabbing in my heart over and over, fast and hard, without slowing down. I was so scared of the pain and what it meant. It finally subsided after hours of exhaustion, but every once in a while I'd lapse back into that downward spiral, and this time being prepared for it, made it worse. Anticipating that stabbing in my heart was awful.

It pains me to know I was pregnant while I had that episode. And there were others like it. What had that done to the baby? Would I miscarry from the extreme levels of anxiety and heart palpitations? After I found out I was pregnant, it came from a place of fear of losing her. This was the baby I waited for. This was the baby who made me a mother. This was my child and I didn't want another one. I didn't want to lose her and have to wait to get pregnant again. What if I never got another positive test? What if this was my only chance? And I had done so, so much in the months before I found out. I could have harmed her. I could have killed her without knowing she existed. I wanted HER. Not another baby. So I panicked. I had nightmares. I couldn't sleep. I clung to her ultrasound picture every night. I kissed it every morning. I had another bad episode right before her 20 week ultrasound. I spotted the day before, for the first time since my last period in March. Why would I spot the day before my ultrasound? Me thinking I knew everything, I tried to prepare myself to go into that ultrasound and be told she was gone. I told myself that because I had gotten the baby I wanted for so long, this would probably happen. Anytime something good happened, something bad had to happen to balance it out.

The night before the ultrasound, I had a breakdown that was just as bad as that terrible first one. I refused to let her picture go. Tony thought I might tear it on accident from holding it too tightly. He wanted me to leave the house and get my mind off things. I couldn't move. I couldn't go anywhere. I screamed and cried and told him terrible things. I told him that if this baby was gone, I couldn't keep going. I said if she was gone I'd do something bad. I couldn't make myself say it. I didn't want to live if I lost her. I didn't want to face the possibility that she might be our only chance at being parents. I was in a dark place, but my loving right side of the brain husband told me she would be fine, and I tried to trust him. We got through the night and the next day we set off to the doctor knowing it could be just as defining of a day as the first time we had gone there together. She could be gone.  But she wasn't.

She wasn't gone. She was there, all ten fingers and ten toes, all four chambers of her little fluttering heart, and she had grown. She weighed a full pound now. She even had her little hand up next to her face. Her legs were crossed so ladylike. Our precious, perfect baby was there, and it was time for my brain to finally catch up and realize she's okay. I'm okay. Everything is okay. Everything is so okay it hurts. And that's okay. I love you, little baby. I hope you don't inherit my crazy emotions and my negativity. You are the happiest thing in my life. You are our whole lives. We love you, Nora.