Kiss Your Miracle

To be completely honest, there was one more factor in my decision not to go back to work that I didn’t mention at the time: a positive pregnancy test. I started feeling sick in the beginning of June and this time around I knew right away it wasn’t the flu. At least for me, pregnancy nausea feels different than a stomach bug. Things I normally love sound awful. The thought of coffee or wine is enough to make me gag. Salad and vegetables? Terrible. But grilled cheese or macaroni? Heaven. Somehow I’m able to feel nauseas and still eat more and worse than usual. So when I suddenly had morning sickness along with the inability to keep my eyes open past 9:30pm, I told Adam we should think about doing a home pregnancy test.

When we did the test, the control line showed up clear and dark. A light second line appeared a few minutes later, so faint I wondered if we were imagining it. “Is this positive?” Adam asked. “I don’t trust it,” I said immediately, anxiety tightening my neck. It’s not that I didn’t want to be pregnant – it’s that our years of infertility trained me to hate home pregnancy tests. I’d heard that any second line is a positive, but ours was so very faint. I looked closely at the stick, narrowing my eyes. How cruel for it to not even give us a straight answer.

Suddenly, a horrible thought occurred to me. Maybe I was pregnant, but the baby was stuck in my fallopian tube. That would throw off my hormones and maybe give us a barely-there positive. I only have one tube to begin with (my other was removed during surgery years ago), and at one point a test showed my remaining tube as 100% blocked. We know that God opened the tube enough for Sky’s little embryonic self to pass through it, but the pessimistic, fearful side of me didn’t assume that would automatically happen again.

At that point we hadn’t made our final decision about my work situation. “There’s no way you’re going back to teaching now,” Adam said suddenly. “Not if you’re pregnant again.” I stomped around the kitchen making dinner. “I can’t think about this right now,” I said. I was planning to get up at 4am the next morning to fly with Skylar to Chicago to see my family. “Let’s just wait until I get back next week,” I said to Adam. “I’ll do another test and maybe it’ll be easier to read.”

A week later our second test was the same as the first and I wanted to scream. How could it not have changed at all? Shouldn’t the line be darker by now? Or nonexistent? Stupid pregnancy tests! I felt like I’d been trying to keep my emotions on pause – not get too excited yet, but not let myself feel disappointed either – and a girl can only do that for so long. I called my doctor’s office and because of my history, they scheduled an early ultrasound, but not until the end of June. “That’s three weeks away!” I said to the nurse on the phone. “Yes, I know,” she said sweetly. “And if you have any sharp pains or bleeding, feel free to call us right away.” I hung up in a daze. Apparently, if the baby was in my tube, I’d figure it out on my own in a less than enjoyable manner. I sighed. Three weeks felt like forever.

In the meantime, Adam and I talked more about my work decision. I taught through my first pregnancy and was willing to do it again. Wouldn’t another baby on the way make things even more stressful financially? But when Adam gently asked me how I felt about it, I admitted that it sounded awful – just the thought of teaching full-time while pregnant and with a toddler at home overwhelmed me. “So that’s that,” he said calmly. “The money will work itself out. This is the right decision for us either way. It’s what we were leaning towards already. The new baby just makes it an easier choice for us.” Adam looked more relaxed than ever, but I was a big ball of nerves. What if we weren’t actually having a new baby? What if I was about to lose my only remaining fallopian tube instead?

Thankfully, pregnancy-induced exhaustion took over my brain every night and I had no trouble sleeping. I even began to feel a bit more settled as the days passed. A verse from Psalm 139 came to my mind whenever I wondered about the baby: “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (v. 16). God knows how long this baby will live, I would remind myself, and he loves this child even more than we do.

Still, I spent the morning of the ultrasound on the verge of a panic attack. When we were finally called back to the examining room, I laid down on the table, explaining to the tech that I have a tipped uterus and sometimes it’s hard to get a good picture of it. I was barely able to get the words out when right there on the screen was the image of a tiny baby – 2 cm to be exact – tucked in exactly the right place, its little heart flickering away at 170bpm. Adam held Sky with one arm and reached down with his free hand for mine. “Everything looks great! You’re eight weeks and four days,” said the tech. “Your due date is February 2^nd.”

Throughout the rest of the day I cried quietly on and off. One miracle baby was enough. But two? I thought about the summer of 2007, when we felt God leading us to wait rather than try IVF again. It made no sense to us at the time. The pain of wanting a baby was so intense that it colored everything else in my life. To think that God had planned to bless us with not just one child, but children – the word “extravagant” comes to mind whenever I think about it. Life can be so painful, even vicious sometimes. But God has been sweet to us, removing our biggest heartache. The day of our ultrasound I wanted to pray, but couldn’t find the words. Anne Lammot, one of my favorite writers, says that some of her best prayers are “Please, please, please,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Sometimes I’m just glad that God already knows my thoughts.

I know we’ll face hardship down the road in one way or another. A healthy pregnancy now does not guarantee a healthy nine months or a healthy child. And I will admit, even if things go perfectly, the thought of having a newborn when my firecracker Skylar is just a year and a half old terrifies me. But for now, my focus is on our Almighty God and what he has done for us again, blessing us with another life growing beneath my heart.