Project Pee-a-thon ended with very much wanted results for me and Louie, and we held onto the high of congratulations, support, encouragement, and prayers for days. We told ourselves we would enjoy this blessing and hold onto the joy. I promised myself I wouldn’t get caught up in the fear and worry and just love every day that I have our little Bumble Bee growing inside me. But things started snowballing. And as I tried to keep the anxiety at bay, it all piled up and knocked me spiraling down into a place where I was practically convinced it was over, that I was just setting myself up for disappointment, and that I was foolish to ever believe I could bring this baby home. Not a good place to be, is it?
I’m teetering on the threshold between love and fear, and I need to find the place of perfect love, the love that will drive out all fear (John 4:18), the love I felt as my heart expanded to hold another child. So I’m pulling out all the stops: prayer, guided imagery, affirmations, mantras, and—most important and most difficult—surrender.
Right now, I’m reading A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson (recommended to me by Elisabeth Manning), and I’m starting to understand what it means to let go and let God:
When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves—to a universe that knows what it’s doing. When stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works. We’re at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives (56).
Part of doing that is trusting that I am held and that, the greater scheme of the universe, my and baby and I are safe no matter what happens. The other part is recognizing that the fears will come, and I need to acknowledge these emotions so they can move through me, instead of trying to wall them up and letting them rot inside me.
I’m teetering on the threshold between love and fear, and though I know it’s impossible to feel completely confident in this pregnancy, I want to leap towards love.
This post is part of the NaBloPoMo daily blogging challenge. The theme for this month is “Between,” which goes perfectly with how I’ve been feeling and where I find myself: between hope and despair, between love and fear, between trying to conceive and holding a living child in my arms.
Our current home is between the hospital where I found out Calvin was no longer alive and delivered his still body from mine and the columbarium where his ashes will be inurned in a niche that is for him and his sisters and, eventually, us.
For that past two years, one of my packing staples has been a digital thermometer, a digital basal body temperature thermometer to be exact. For those who don’t know, your basal body temperature is your body’s lowest temperature while at rest.
