Crushed

So I decided to blog some important stuff tonight after all, since my skinny freak of a husband is at the gym and I'm all alone with my Coldplay. I'm mostly writing this for me. I'm happy to consider any advice and comments, but I'm not counting on finding a solution right now, so please don't feel like you have to find me one. I'm considering all this to be an experiment in which I do not yet have all the data. And it's just at a particularly mysterious and frustrating stage in its development.

A week ago tonight I started to believe in the impossible.

I was doing my standard prayer for eight or nine days past ovulation. "Well, Heavenly Father, I'm not expecting a lot, but if I could turn up pregnant this month ... well, if you wanted to make me really happy, you know what to do."

And I really had a transcendental experience. That burning in the bosom that I was drilling down into my heart looking for a week before thinking about different roads to adoption? There it was, when I was thinking in my usual self-conscious, mostly-dismissive, barely-hopeful way about a miracle pregnancy.

I never felt that way when we were actively trying to conceive. I never had a spiritual hope to cling to related to pregnancy. One of the hardest and best lessons I learned during that time was that real hope is anchored in only One Thing, in the Atonement of Christ. And yet, all these years after we hopped off that train, here was hope, tied to a very different idea.

Following that, of course, I found some physical symptoms to corroborate my feelings. I was giddy and serene at the same time. Friday I had the same spiritual impressions during my evening prayer. Add stunned to the list of feelings.

Saturday I worked up the guts to tell my husband, and that was not easy. When he got off the fertility train he cursed it and shook off the dust of his shoes with a few choice cuss words on the way out. I, on the other hand, have the train schedule tattooed on my uterus, so it's a little different. But he was good. He agreed that I should do a home pregnancy test.

And then suddenly I realized how absolutely terrified I felt. I've taken those tests before. I've never, ever passed. I could just imagine an emotional setback of ... oooh, eight years or so. Back to the bad, really bad days where I just wanted to sleep, only sleep, until I could wake up and find the whole nightmarish experience overwith. Kind of like a mild, chicken-crap version of suicidal. Some people reading this will understand how scary that was, and some will not. To me it was so scary that I stayed in bed most of the day Saturday.

At the same time I felt a kind of wonder, amazement that impossible things could really happen, and that we could know about them only through a spiritual witness. I thought to myself that I was really learning something important.

Sunday morning I took the test. Single line, same old story. Double failure, I started to bleed. Bonus! I wasn't even supposed to start until Tuesday! I stayed in bed most of the day Sunday. Oh, except for the part where I lost it in sacrament meeting. I'm so glad we sit in the back row!

Sunday afternoon I got tired of bed, and I got up and went to a dinner for some friends who are moving out of state. The cramps hit as soon as I sat down, and I grimaced through the evening.

Monday I stayed home from work and painted all day. That was therapeutic, just zoning out and painting. Yesterday and today I have been too busy to think or hurt. But my questions are not answered.

Would God really tell me something untrue? Would He jerk me around, crush my heart on purpose? And if so, why? A broken heart is open to His words, says the more spiritual part of me. Maybe now the other answers I've been yearning for will start to come.

At the same time, my dark side wonders, have I been mistaken all these years about the way I feel the Spirit? What about all the other impossible things I've been believing because of the way I felt? What if all those feelings are no more true than what I was feeling last week? Because I'll tell you what, they felt pretty much the same.