Our Birth Story
(A quick note: I realize this is a very long post, but it was important for me to tell this story and work through it. It’s been a very therapeutic, healing process to open up about the joys and the challenges of our birth story. With that in mind, while it may be long, this was more for me. Even so, if you decide to venture through it, I hope you enjoy our story.)
Letting Go
For me, Baron’s birth was a lesson in letting go. Not one thing went according to plan. Harlan and I were married for 3 years when we decided to start trying to conceive. Like everyone else, we assumed that it would only take a couple of months. But after 2 years, and no pregnancy, we had basically given up. We started looking into adoption. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on fertility treatments when that money could go toward adopting a baby who needs a home. In the mean time, we were still talking to our OB, Dr. Tatum, about why I was unable to conceive. At this point there was no explanation – I just wasn’t ovulating. I won’t lie, I was heartbroken every time I took a pregnancy test and it was negative. It was really hard for me because I had 8 friends who were pregnant around me. It seemed as though every time we heard from one of our friends, it was an announcement that they were having a baby. I really wanted to be happy for them, but it just seemed so unfair. In September 2010, Dr. Tatum gave us a prescription for Clomid – a medicine that’s basically supposed to kick-start ovulation. We weren’t sure if we even wanted to take the medicine. At this point, we were pretty set on the adoption. We had finally let go and realized that the whole situation was completely out of our hands. We were thinking, there must be a reason we’re not getting pregnant. There must be a baby out there who God wants in our lives. So we just held on to the prescription and never filled it.
Could it be??
October came around and something seemed different. I had gotten my hopes up too many times, so I really didn’t want to convince myself that I might be pregnant, just to have my heart broken again. But as the month went on and I couldn’t shake the feeling, I decided to take this extra pregnancy test that I had left over from before. I knew (from lots of test-taking) that you’re supposed to take the test first thing in the morning. So I was going to save it for the next morning. At 3 am on October 20, I was awake and couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I finally snuck to the bathroom, hoping not to wake Harlan. I sat there staring at it for the whole testing time, watching a 2nd little pink line slowly appear where I’d never seen one before. I couldn’t believe my eyes. After all this time, my first ever positive pregnancy test. I kept thinking, I must be reading this wrong… But it’s pretty basic. Not a lot of room for error. Eventually I went back to bed and hid the test so Harlan wouldn’t see it. Of course I couldn’t sleep after that. I kept getting up and using my phone as a flashlight to check and make sure the pink line was still there. I decided that come a reasonable hour in the morning, I’d go buy another test and make sure this one wasn’t faulty. I didn’t want to tell Harlan till I was sure. Well, I bought a two-pack which resulted in two more positive tests.