embracing the book.

On December 13, 2008, I placed an order on Amazon.com for the fourth edition of What to Expect When You're Expecting. Mr. Hope and I had been engaged for a little over five months and we decided I would discontinue my Depo Provera shot, since we knew it could take up to a year for fertility to be restored after stopping it.

We were planning for the future.

Life conspired against us. Our wedding got delayed and then got delayed again. Mr. Hope lost a dear family member. There were health issues. Lots and lots of health issues.

In January 2011, we went for a preconception appointment at the gynocologist. This was at the recommendation of What to Expect, a book that, in the two-plus years of owning it, I'd never made it past the first chapter - the one about planning. My gyno told me that based on my age, it could take me six months or so to get pregnant.

Y'all know how that story goes.

When I got pregnant in December 2014, I had to hunt down the book. What to Expect. I couldn't remember where it got stashed. Mr. Hope found it in a cabinet in his office. I took the book into my office but couldn't bring myself to read it. Instead, I shoved it in a drawer with my unopened What to Expect workout DVD and unwritten-in pregnancy journal.

I never did read the book, or work out to the DVD, or write in the journal. Things went downhill pretty quickly.

But earlier this week, after the u/s and beta, I dug up the book. I curled up with it on the couch, and I started reading. And then I read it again the next night. And the next.

There's something oddly liberating about feeling okay enough to read this book that I've had for literally six years and some change. Sort of like how I finally got it together enough to identify an OB I think I want to work with, and call to make an appointment.

I go back and forth between feeling excited and wanting to tell the world and semi-certain that if I get too excited or tell too many people it will all be over tomorrow. Chance, my former therapist, called this superstition. I think it's just the result of too many years of infertility, too many years of things going wrong, of easy things being hard.

Or maybe it's a little of both?