I was blog surfing today and I’m not exactly sure how I got to this particular blog.. you know how it is – you start somewhere and click a link here and there and then all of a sudden you’ve no idea where you are anymore. It’s like six degrees of separation in the blogiverse.

Anyway, I found this blog and there were so many wonderful things on there – most of which I am planning on blogging about in the next couple of days, but for today, the thing I really needed to see, was this:

ready

I guess that doesn’t sound all that poignant, but today has been a rough day for me, and it brought me some comfort. This morning I woke up early – from the cold mainly, we are in the process of moving overseas and our stuff was picked up last week to start the process of sea freighting it over the Tasman sea so at the moment I am sleeping in a sleeping bag, on an inflatable bed. It’s the middle of winter here so it hasn’t been the most comfortable of nights. Anyway, I woke up this morning and I did a pregnancy test. It’s not the first pregnancy test I’ve done in the last while, but I was hoping that it would be my last.. for 9 months at least.

No such luck.

We’ve been trying to have a baby now for what feels like a long time, though I’m reluctant to say it that way because I know there are lots of women who’ve been trying for a lot longer than we have. We’ve been trying to have a baby now for one year, 3 months and 7 days – not that I’m counting! So this morning’s negative pregnancy test wasn’t just a negative pregnancy test, when you’ve been testing for this long it really does start to knock the wind out of you. So, I was wandering around today, after having the wind knocked out of me, feeling a little bit like a zombie anyway because I haven’t been sleeping well on our inflatable mattress/sleeping bag bed and everything feels a bit surreal now as well because our house is totally devoid of furniture and we’re making this gigantic move etc etc etc and then I stumbled across this blog and saw this post – and in particular, this picture and for a second I just couldn’t breathe.

“It doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen… it means you’re not ready for it”

It could be the lack of sleep talking – I do tend to get a bit crazy when I am especially tired or hungry, but it really spoke to me. Because on some level I really don’t believe that I’m ready for it. I wonder if anyone truly does? I can’t say for sure whether I’m really not ready for it, or if I am creating this sense of not ready for is as a self defense mechanism so that I’m able to survive if we ever do find out that we aren’t able to have children. I can feel myself doing that sometimes, when people ask us about babies and I say something flippant and off hand about maybe never having them.. all the while hiding behind this shield, sick with fear that we won’t be able to, that i’m barren.

Anyway, all of that is besides the point because tonight I’m going to go to sleep and I’m going to be remembering those words “it doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen” and they are right, it doesn’t mean that. This negative pregnancy test, this one solitary line, doesn’t mean that next time there won’t be two lines. It doesn’t mean that I’ll never be pregnant. It just means that I’m not pregnant right now. And I have to believe, even if just to get me through today and tomorrow and the next day, that one day it WILL happen and that the reason it’s not happening isn’t necessarily my fault. I am not faulty or broken or useless, I am just ‘not ready for it’. Looking at it that way makes me feel a lot better. Stronger… at least for now.

Anyway, thank you Sarah for being my little shining light today.

picture credit