Optimism/Pessimism; or, That Un-Real Feeling

Over the past few days, I've let myself start to feel optimistic about this pregnancy. In the moment, I really enjoy that. I enjoy imagining telling our families and friends or attending my shower or decorating the nursery. While I'm day-dreaming, I feel happy and secure. If I hold this hope at arm's length and observe it objectively, though, I scare myself again. If I read accounts of women with excellent betas and on-target heartbeats who still lost their precious babies, I get depressed.

Ultimately, none of this feels real--not the happy dreaming times and not the scared and worried times. I've entertained those fantasies or ones just like them for so long now, so many, many years, without any real sense of when they'd come true. I still feel like I'm emotionally in that mode, that "Wouldn't it be nice if..." kind of mode rather than an "It's going to be awesome when..." frame of mind. I still refuse to calculate a due date or to think of bringing a baby home this fall.

I keep both ultrasound printouts and both positive pee-sticks in a carefully arranged pile on our tall dresser in the bedroom. I sometimes touch them as I walk past. I often stand there and stare at them while I'm drying my hair or putting on makeup. And it's so hard to connect the image on those printouts with something going on inside my body. Probably because I still don't really feel all that different. More tired, my boobs hurt more and are bigger, I'm peeing a lot. But I've had no nausea in over a week and feel physically close to normal.

In the drawer of the nightstand next to my bed is an older ultrasound and two older pee-sticks. I haven't opened that drawer since we got this BFP. I don't want to put Smudgie's evidence away with those of my lost pregnancies. I think I'm going to keep everything, every new ultrasound we get or test I take, out there where I can see them and just hope and pray that I don't have to eventually put them away.

But overall, things are okay. I've been practicing relaxation on demand, and it's working better and better with each attempt. And I've passed a few m&m milestones over the last week. We've made it passed the point when we started spotting last time (6 weeks-6 weeks 3 days) and we saw and heard a normal heartbeat, which we never got to before. The big milestones are still to come-- the day the m&m stopped growing (7 weeks) and the day we learned it had died (7 weeks 4 days)--but I'm hoping more and more each day that we'll pass those, too.

I know I'll be scared again on Friday for our 7 weeks 1 day ultrasound. That's a given. But I'm doing my best not to grieve a potentially devastating day before I absolutely have to.