Life's poetry

Don't worry. I'm not going to assault you with a terrible attempt at poetry. It's better than that.

Most of you have heard my news on Facebook, but the full story is so much better, so I'm sharing it here. This won't really fit on a status update. :)

As I had mentioned a long time ago, we believe (though we missed the time frame to achieve proof) that I had an early miscarriage on Mothers' Day last year. This past April, as Holy Week slowly approached, I could feel the anniversary of that experience a year ago approaching as well. I felt sad. I wanted more kids. G was getting there, too, actually, and we've never been on the same page about that--ever. We just weren't sure we could make that decision, officially, because our chances for having a healthy, neurotypical child are much slimmer than the average family. We were so close. Just not sure we could say, yes. We're doing this.

The end of the school year approached as well, and along with it, an exponentially larger amount of stress than what it typically brings. I won't go into that. It's my blog, not my husband's, so it's not really my space to share his work-related stresses and issues. But suffice it to say that it affected our home. Hugely. He was not himself, and I vascillated between, "OH MY GOSH, WE ALL HAVE PROBLEMS," and scurrying around trying to do anything I could to make our home a safe, comfortable place for him to be. Combine that with me being sad about the wee one we'd lost a year earlier and a weird hormonal blip on my radar, and it's a recipe for near constant rushing around-slash-breaking down and crying.

It finally culminated during Holy Week. The week started with a tearful conversation between my husband and me that revealed a possible problem with our insurance that could cause us to lose absolutely everything, which at the end of the spiral, would force us to move away from our home, our church, the kids' schools, everything. Happy Holy Week, peeps. We're in full-on panic mode.

We thrust ourselves into church. We had no control over anything else. The only thing I could control was whether or not we were going to show up at Holy Week services. End of the day, I was just freaking out and couldn't think of a safer place to be. So that's where we were. We prayed for relief. We prayed for our own repentance wherever it might be necessary. We prayed, come Pascha! We can't wait any longer for the relief, the hope, the redemption of the resurrection!

And Wednesday morning, promptly at 4 am, we discovered that I'm pregnant.

This was a little more than a week away from Mothers' Day. I had the joy of celebrating Mothers' Day knowing that, although the one we lost a year ago wouldn't be replaced in any way, we had the hope of a new life to look forward to, which I have to say--it takes some of the sting out. A lot, actually. And as laborious and anxiety-ridden as the first half of Holy Week had been, the second half was equally as peaceful. Instead of, "Come, Pascha, we're in agony!", our prayer became a calm, "Come, Pascha...thank you, just come." And on that perfect Feast that was the culmination of basically everything for our family, we shared our news with our church, who received us with more joy than we ever expected.

In the end, the pieces slowly came together with G's work stress, insurance, my, ahem, "hormonal blip," (thank you, littlest Oprisko) and everything that had had us in such a panic. And all is well.

It's not that we have no worries...I do worry that this child will have autism. It's a major concern. As soon as more foods begin appealing to me (hopefully in the next week or two), I will be changing my diet to avoid some major allergens. I don't know if that'll work. I'll never know if it did, actually, even if our child's brain is flawless. But it's what I'm doing. I have to do something, you know? What else can I do? But all that to say, we do have concerns. And we don't know how this is going to turn out in a few years. But we're hopeful. And we try to maintain peace. Because, really, in the end, what can we do now? We will love this new child. That's all we can know right now, and that has to be enough.

I know a lot of you who may read this may find this total hogwash in the face of science, but I do humbly ask for your prayers if you think of it and do that sort of thing. If you don't, if you're annoyed with me for asking, I ask that particular group to remember us and stand with us as we face what can sometimes be a frightening unknown, as hopeful and grateful as we are for this new life.

I love you all. Thanks for hearing.