Why me?

When I was told that my chromosome blood test came back abnormal I felt like time instantly froze. I remember sitting in a parking lot of a church that I pulled into to take the phone call. As my doctor talked to me on the phone her words just seemed to go in one ear and out the other as if she was speaking in an entirely different language. Denial, anger, fear, sadness....these emotions flooded my body in an alarming rate... my brain just couldn't comprehend what was happening.

I was told that I was born with a Balanced Translocation Reciprocal chromosome disorder. Translation: my genes are mixed up. For some reason, my chromosomes 5 and 18 were sticky in the process of me being created and their bottoms broke off and reattached in the wrong place. How in the world is this even possible? It's a pretty rare disorder about 1 in 500 people are affected and yet here I am one of the lucky ones.

I began to look online all weekend to learn and educate myself about my chromosome disorder. I wanted to read, research, know and understand (at least try to) everything I could about it. My husband warned me not to, he was concerned that it would make me more upset. But I told him that "knowledge is power" and I couldn't stop.

I spent a lot of time being angry. Why me? What did I do wrong? I thought I did everything RIGHT? I waited to get married until I was 32 to an incredible man. We have a warm home that our child could grow up in, we are both well educated, college graduates with jobs that we love....yet here I was being told that it may be hard for us to have a baby.

In what world is this fair? Especially when my only brother has FOUR kids. I have had FOUR pregnancies. All that have ended before 8 weeks.

Each time I found out I was pregnant I thanked God for the blessing of a baby. I prayed vehemently that this time it would stick that this was the time for us to become parents. Each week that passed I waited in fear, sick with worry that I would lose the pregnancy again. And each time I did.

#1 found out May 7, 2015, EDD Jan. 11 2016, Loss 5/27/15
#2 found out Sept. 16th, 2016 EDD May 22, 2016 Loss 10/10/2015
#3 found out March 23rd, 2016 EDD Dec. 02 2016 Loss 03/28/2016
#4 found out Sept 14th, 2016 EDD May 23rd 2016, Loss 10/01/2016

motherly intuition

July 1, 2009

baby NOT on board

rock a bye baby in your sweet slumber
kiss you my darling good night
falling in love with your heart melting coos
rocking so gently in my arms so tight
makes me smile to watch your eyes close

i dream of your soft giggles and tiny hands,
bubbles at bath time and crawling across the floor,
taking pictures of all the firsts,
i feel like it's all just a dream and nothing more

7 years ago I wrote this poem. Call it intuition, call it "motherly instincts" but I always knew something would be hard for me to have a baby. I always carried this feeling around with me. However, I thought it would be the getting pregnant part that would be hard for me. I kind of wish I was right in some ways. I was right in knowing it would be hard to have a baby. But I didn't know it would be this hard.

Who has that conversation with themselves that if they couldn't get pregnant naturally then they would accept it? And who has that conversation with themselves years before they even start to "try"? I did.

And now, flash forward to the present. My amazing husband and I have been married for two years and we have been "trying" to have a baby for 18 months. For some couples, that is a normal timeline. For us, mid-30s it feels like a ticking time bomb. Especially when you've already had 4 consecutive miscarriages.