The Beginning

Every story must have a proper beginning. Mine (ours) begins with us. Those two cute kids you see above fell in love and just like the children's rhyme goes, then came marriage. If I do say so myself it is a great marriage as marriages go, even in the beginning. Everything was hunky dory for a while, we lived on love and not much else because our income was ridiculously small (an entirely different story), and had fun just the two of us. In fact if you were in my life in those first couple of years you would have heard me say not just that I was happy being a family of 2 but that I didn't want kids in the near future.  But my heart and mind were changed one Easter Sunday, 2 years into our sweet romance.

We had just come home from Easter dinner at my grandma's house. My cousin had a new baby to show off and surprising to me was my jealousy. I came home wanting a baby of my own. Enough of this lonely 2 person family (see how easily I forgot about how great freedom was?), I wanted kids and the sooner the better. My husband, bless his heart, agreed with me and a plan was set in motion. Project Baby was underfoot.

Except for it didn't happen like that...

Time passed. Our lives continued and changed, along with our living situations and careers. The one thing that remained constant, our childlessness. I hate to admit it but I was not handling this fact very well. My husband, poor man, bore the brunt of my crazy emotional self. Every baby or small child I saw was almost guaranteed to produce a crying episode in me. I became an expert in swallowing my emotions in public just long enough to make it to my car or home, where I ugly cried until I didn't have any more tears.

It was awful. Awful!  Awful!

Hope deferred makes the heart sick... there were never truer words for the way we felt.

And of course like any self respecting human would do, we made it harder on ourselves. I am a planner. I make lists, organize and then do it all again because it makes me happy. Project Baby was no different. From the moment we decided it was time for kids, we had names chosen and a schedule of how old we would be when they were born (plan A and B). You can laugh, it's ok, but I am absolutely serious. Every journal I have ever used from 2006 has at least one list of children's names and dates written in the back. It was a dream we ate, drank and breathed. We constantly talked about it and how our lives would change and all of the wonderful things that would be when we finally became parents.

We were stupid. I know. We were desperate. Desperate people do crazy stupid things. Trust me. I know. 

.........(To Be Continued)...........................................................................................................................