Certainty

So I carried on. I had given myself a deadline: Dec 31, 2012. That was it. If nothing happened by then, I would go no further...I had already traveled down a long and difficult road, and I was getting older, and I didn't want to "push the envelope" ---so to speak.
In the interim, I began having conversations with all types of different women: women at the gym, women I met through acting class, neighbors, friends, and strangers. I found one theme that seemed to keep popping up throughout: it seemed as if all of them knew whether they wanted to have a child or not. I decided that I envied them their certainty.
"Oh, I always knew I wanted to have kids." One woman professed, and then waved her hand, as if that part of her life were a foregone conclusion.
"How?" I wanted to ask, but didn't. My voice inside my head would ask: How do you just know these things? I felt isolated in my fear, and alone in my thoughts. How do you just "know?"

Something Interesting

I have to confess that I've found something particularly interesting throughout this exercise of writing about this part of my life. For those of you who have been following along, you might have noticed that there have been very few comments posted since I started writing about this...in the past, I've usually had a fair amount of comments here and there, a smattering of opinion to say the least.
What's happening now is that I am getting a lot of private emails: women who feel the same way I have felt about certain things, women who have been urging me to carry on with this story, women who have been rooting for me to find my place on this journey...I can go on, but whenever someone emails me off-blog, I like to keep the correspondence private, as that's what the writer intended.
What I find interesting is this: that these same women feel compelled to email me instead of make public comments. It's as if they are both aware and afraid of the judgements that come from choosing a child-free lifestyle and/or not giving in to the child-centered society that we live in here in America.
I say all this to say that I am glad I had the courage to talk about this; to unveil my truth, and to know that there are other women out there that think like me. I will say that I have found some wonderful support here, and my only wish is that people in my "real life" would do the same.
As always...we shall see.

Onward

Without going into all the gory details, I was pregnant.
And I had a miscarriage.
And I was okay.
It was strange, and I was overwhelmed for a few days, asking myself: "What does this mean?" A part of  me thought perhaps it was my answer...maybe I wasn't supposed to or able to carry a child.
I am pragmatic at my very best; I felt once again that if it wasn't meant to be...that it wasn't meant to be. I almost decided to end the journey right then and there, but I had promised myself that I would continue to follow this path until the end of the year.
And so I did; faith and fear battling for a space inside my heart, I carried on.

Strange

One morning last July, I woke up feeling...strange. I can't really explain it any other way, but when you think about what I do for a living, you'll understand that I can feel when the slightest thing is off in my body. I can tell you if perhaps I didn't drink enough water the day before (read: too much wine) or I can usually pinpoint even the slightest ache and pain. That said, I can still remember quite vividly waking up and feeling unlike anything I had ever felt. I had this intense soreness in my breasts and my whole body felt...off.
I assumed it was perhaps that time of the month and went about my day. Later on that day I had a fleeting thought: could I be pregnant?
I didn't think so, but...then again, I wasn't sure.