Get Busy Living; or, The Restart

I got my period yesterday, six weeks after my d&c. For once, everything's proceeding in textbook fashion.

For dating purposes, my OB had recommended waiting until this point to start trying again. We...sort of did. And sort of didn't. So I spent the last two weeks wondering if lightening would strike twice. Hoping it would, worrying it wouldn't, worrying it would, wondering what my childcare arrangements will need to look like next year, and feeling a lot of financial anxiety about what this would mean for the surprise fellowship I was just offered that starts in September.

I greeted the unmistakable evidence of another cycle with resignation and some mingled relief and disappointment. I'm sure I'll greet the end of this cycle with a similar emotional blend, though possibly weighed a tad more heavily to the disappointment side. And on and on until...

Well, we're not there yet, are we?

I'm not going to update here with a record of each ovulation, each failed cycle, the minute fluctuations between hope and despair that make up my five weeks between beginnings and ends. I don't want that kind of record this time around. I don't want that kind of focus.

But that's what will be happening in the background, under the surface of all the other things that we do every day. I hope that we will be lucky again and that's all this second try will ever need to be. But if not, eventually there will be doctors' visits and treatment plans and I will write about them.

This is just living, though, and I think, this time around, I'd like to try just living it.