Ready or Not

I'm finally feeling ready to blog about this. It took me a few days. And look, I'm already getting ahead of myself.

Last February I got pregnant. I was just shy of 12 weeks when I miscarried. Since then, I've been trying to get pregnant again. Except for last month, when I realized ovulation was going to happen when my husband and I were on vacation - a vacation not at a five-star resort with a king size bed, which some might say would be a perfect conception holiday, but a vacation where we'd be sleeping on the futons and air mattresses of various friends and family. And I think having sex in other people's houses is a bit rude, unless you're going to invite them to join you, so I stopped charting and stopped paying attention and tried my very very best to stop worrying and stressing about it.

Naturally, I got pregnant.

(Ok, ten days without having sex with my very sexy husband was just too much to manage.)

So after months of planning and scheduling and utterly un-spontaneous sex, all it took was that totally not planned but still extremely well-timed night of passion (or compromise of my principles, whichever you prefer). And the weird thing about this is, I can't seem to get excited about it.

I want to be excited, believe me. I want to be full of smiles and secret satisfaction the way I was last time around. I want to be bursting with joy over sharing this news with friends and family. But I'm really, really not, and I haven't been able to figure out exactly why.

Here are some theories:
- I don't want to emotionally invest myself because I'm afraid I'll lose this one too.
- I'm bored by the concept of the first trimester, because nothing very interesting happens (no hearing the heartbeat, no feeling the baby move, no picking out cribs or layettes or names).
- I've already been through the boring part, and am annoyed that I have to go through it again. Last time, I was just getting to the good part, dammit. Can't we skip this?
- I'm really freaking tired. I don't know if this is really a reason, but it kind of colours everything right at the moment.
- Endlessly obsessing over "how big is the baby now" is less interesting when it's not new anymore.

I obviously still have a lot of unresolved feelings about the miscarriage (I told a girlfriend tonight that one of the emotions I felt at the time was embarrasment at having to call back friends and family and "take back" the happy news I'd given them just a week earlier. I know embarrassment is not a rational reaction, but there it is). For the months since the loss, I've thought that as soon as I got pregnant again, all those conflicted emotions would go away, and that I would be "right with the world" again. I think I held off blogging on this - and believe me, I've had this blog name registered for a couple of months now, just waiting for the moment I got a positive test - because I wanted my first post to be full of joy and excitement and anticipation, and I kept waiting to feel that way.

It took a day or two to remember that one of the reasons I blog, perhaps the most important, is to help me work stuff through. It's a way of having a conversation with myself, since I don't know anyone else who could possibly listen to me this much.

So, it's okay, it's valid, it's reasonable that I am not as excited as I'd hoped to be, or as excited as I was last time, or as excited as the few people I've told so far seem to be. And it's okay if this doesn't turn out to be quite the blogging experience I expected it to be. Honestly, calling pregnancy "expecting" is such a misnomer, since nothing about the experience so far has ever been what I expected.