2: Planned Parenthood

I am a planner. It’s who I am. Unfortunately for me there are a lot of things in life that cannot be planned. But believe me when I say that I sure give it a shot anyway. Plus, being married to a medical resident, my planning nature really comes in handy. So why not plan a baby?

Relatively early on in our marriage, Matthew and I discussed and prayed about the best time in our lives to have a baby. Because babies can be planned, of course. If it had been solely up to me, I probably would have decided to start trying after a year or two of marriage. But my husband’s opinion mattered too and we ultimately decided that we would stop using birth control around our 3-year wedding anniversary.

There is another thing you should know about me. My life-long dream has always been to be a wife and a mother. Though I truly believe that finishing an education and earning a degree are important, I have never been one that desired to climb the career ladder and become a boss of some corporation (hats off to those women who do, we need you!). True to that first belief, I graduated with my Bachelors in Nursing and have worked as a nurse for the last five years. I like what I do. But I have never felt completely satisfied. This may be bold of me to say, but I truly feel called and destined to fulfill the role of a wife and mother and I know I am not the only woman out there who feels this way. Though Matthew wants to be a father, it’s a little harder for him to see himself in that role with everything else he has going on in his life at the moment. He is currently half way through his medical residency to become an eye surgeon and is passionate about saving the eyesight of the world, one eyeball at a time. When all this baby talk started, he wasn’t even finished with medical school. We figured that in 3 years he would be done with medical school and have his first year of residency completed. Sounded like the perfect time to start a family! Let the countdown begin. In fact, I am pretty sure that I had written down in a calendar “bye, bye birth control, hello cute baby Hartman!”

In my mind, we would go off birth control and a positive pregnancy test would be only a couple months away. Did I mention I also set expectations at every corner of my life? Not exactly the greatest habit.

Finally, the time came. We went off birth control in May of 2016. During this time, I was out in California for a friends wedding. While I was away, Matthew spent some personal time in prayer, specifically in regards to having a baby. He had his own questions about the ethics of bringing a child into a world that seemingly becomes less and less of a child-friendly place every day. Maybe one day, I will get him to write a post about this, but the bottom line is that he felt impressed by God that starting a family wasn’t just our own plan, but that it was God’s plan too. This was one of the best phone calls I ever received! Thank you, Jesus!

I became every OB/GYN’s dream patient. I started to take my organic $50 prenatal vitamins faithfully, stopped drinking coffee, exercised, ate healthfully, and read pregnancy blogs. I mean, what embryo wouldn’t want to create their little home inside of me! I had even planned out how I would tell Matthew we were pregnant and had a custom gift made from Etsy. Rush ordered, of course, because I was for sure going to be pregnant any day now.

After a few months, I began to notice that my cycles were getting longer and more irregular. I asked my doctor husband (eyeballs, not babies) about it and he didn’t seem to be too concerned. He would respond “we haven’t been trying that long, it usually takes longer than one cycle. “ I would roll my eyes and move on.

In October of 2016, I just new I was pregnant. I didn’t know what being pregnant felt like, but I knew that I was. I felt tired and a little nauseated in the mornings and was on day 48 of my cycle (the longest one yet). I figured I should probably take a pregnancy test. It was a Monday morning when I took my first ever pregnancy test while face-timing my best friend, Annabelle (yes, we are that close). The excitement deescalated quickly as the 3 minutes passed and the test read negative. How could this be? I swore I was pregnant! Did I just want it so bad, that I gave myself pregnancy symptoms? “It was all in my head”, I told myself. I cried and tossed the pregnancy test in the trash. We felt like we had God’s blessing on starting a family, shouldn’t this be easy? It was then that I first started to wonder if something was physiologically wrong or if I just needed to have more patience.

photo credit: spenser roy lim