{Originally published on Writing My Wrongs}

“Serendipity: to make discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things not in quest of.” - Wikipedia.org

It’s been two days, and I am still shaking. I still cannot catch my breath. I still feel dizzy and disoriented. I feel drained. Depleted of all my energy.

Ever been in a car accident and end up okay, but also end up shaking and traumatized for a few days? I feel like that.

My breathing becomes more rapid and shallow, and my eyes well with tears just recollecting the events that transpired this past Sunday.

Yes. I visited the amazing powerful Claud. Claud and I met at a diner in the same town that my daughter goes to school in. Of course I knew this. Of course I let her know. Since we have not met face-to-face and only correspond via email, I felt it terribly important to let her know this. Why? Well, I was very concerned that if, by any force of any god, we ran into each other she might think I had become some crazy stalker. I am a bit crazy but I am not a stalker.

My daughter made it clear when we first reunited that she did not want to meet YET. I have not pushed. I have developed the relationship slowly, followed her lead and let things flow as they may. That being said, I won’t deny that I am anxious to meet her. Anxious to sit with her and share coffee, talk books, look at her beautiful face, hear the sound of her voice, listen to her laugh. To touch her again. To be back in the same room with a piece of my soul that left me 20 years ago.

I told her of my visit via email. She did not respond. That was okay. I felt I had done my duty of “warning” her.

Saturday morning I happen to check her away message on AIM. It says “parents”. This confuses me. Was she home for the weekend? Was she sick? Did something happen? On a whim, I check her school academic calendar. I learn that the weekend I will be in town is parents weekend. Her aparents will be there the same time I will. We will all be breathing the same air.

I get nervous. I rethink my plans with Claud. I decide against canceling. I realize I am being foolish. I cannot plan my life around where she is at any given time. I cannot avoid that part of the state simply because she is there.

So, I go. I drive 70 miles to visit Claud. As I enter the town we are meeting in, I cross over a street named Michael Avenue (name changed for privacy). I gasp for air. Its like a tidal wave hits me. I shake. For the past year I have been mailing letters and packages to my daughter’s school on Michael Avenue. I felt like crossing that street was like going over a threshold, opening a gate, passing into some sacred space. Her space.

pregnant woman: Hey! I’m pregnant!

friend/relative/co-worker/near-stranger: Congratulations! When are you due?

pregnant woman: On [insert super-specific and official-sounding date here]. We’re really excited!

friend/relative/co-worker/near-stranger: Wow; that’s great. Do you know what you’re having yet?

pregnant woman (according to personality and sarcasm level): We don’t know yet. OR A little boy! OR A little girl! OR Gee, I don’t know; a human baby, we hope.

The thing is, though, that the ‘due date,’ or Estimated Date of Delivery (EDD), or EDC (Estimated Date of Confinement), is an incredibly problematic little piece of information. For most people, it’s a
flat-out guess at the date that would be 38 weeks (266 days) after the date of conception, or (even less reliably) 40 weeks after the first day of the pregnant woman’s last menstrual period. The little
wheel-of-due-dates is based on Naegele’s Rule, which was developed in the 1830s; some studies have suggested that other methods of dating (including Nichols’ Rule and the much more nuanced Mittendorf-Williams Rule) are more accurate.

If you don’t keep track of your ovulation and sexual encounters and can’t remember exactly when you started your last period because you are freakin’ busy or not good with dates, or if you have an unusual or irregular menstrual cycle that means you don’t ovulate when Textbook Female Body ovulates, the due date is more fantasy than reality.

{Originally published on Baby On Bored}

Let me just start by saying if you have an ultrasound picture of your baby stuck on your refrigerator with a magnet, you’re not someone I want to be friends with. And if you have someone else’s baby’s ultrasound picture up there, well, that’s just a cry for help. I’m never sure what I’m supposed to say when confronted with this. “Wow, that’s one sexy fetus?” I got pictures from my ultrasound too but I didn’t wallpaper the house with them. Isn’t it bad enough that we have to see a million pictures of your baby after it’s born? Now we have to see what it kinda sorta looks like before it even comes out?

I knew early on in my pregnancy I wasn’t like other pregnant women. When my husband and I went for my ultrasound, (yes, he came with me: there was like a 95% percent chance he was the dad we figured he should tag along), the first thing the nurse asked me was if I’d brought a video tape. A video tape? I must’ve looked confused because she explained to me “most people want to take home a souvenir of this magic event.” I nodded and said “Yeah, I definitely won’t need that. I’m barely on board with the whole pregnancy thing as it is.” To which the nurse replied that she was reporting me to social services. Okay, she didn’t say it out loud but I could see it in her stare.

Clearly there are many many people who do opt for the ultrasound video. If you are one of them, just know - I don’t want to see it. Oh, and that goes double for your skydiving video. About the only way I’d ever be interested in watching footage of your big jump …is if you don’t make it. It’s like the world is chock full of people with no clue of their capacity to be irritating. And pregnancy just magnifies it.

Pregnant women seem to take one of two paths when they get knocked up, although — being annoying– they’d probably refer to it as a “journey.”

First there’s the woman who loooooves being pregnant. You know her. She’s so excited to join the Cult of Mommy that she’s taking pregnancy yoga before the before the stick turns blue. Anyone who revels this much in being pregnant is suspect in my book…

Originally published on The Calm Before the Stork.

So, lesson number one postpartum: Don’t set your blog readers up for a two or three part series when you barely know if you’ll be sleeping any day soon.

When I sat down to write that first post-birth post, in a fit of adrenaline (post-mama’s-first-meconium, ahem), I had the story all mapped out in my head. But once I’d finished the birth part, I needed a nap.

I still need a nap.

But I must finish the story.

Suffice it to say, or rather, in summary, in short: My baby was starving.

They tell you that the baby comes into this world with about three days’ worth of fat stores. Enough to keep him going while he and you learn how to breastfeed him on the meager yet thick drips of colostrum, until your milk comes in.

I was able to get something that looked like latching going on that first night in the hospital. The night nurse, a young black woman with a thick island accent, oversaw these attempts. The baby was crying. A lot.

“Oh, he is hungry! And he is frustrated! Oh yes, he is very very frustrated,” she said, over, and over, and over, and over, about 17 times, in a singsongy voice.

I didn’t sleep that first night.

Originally published on Fuse Moms

The common denominator of first-time pregnant women is not distended
bellies or compromised bladders. It is not the fear of another human
being exiting their body. Instead, they pursue one goal – preparation.
Whether it’s stocking up on diapers or painting a nursery in a soothing
color, these gals feel the need to prepare for their new arrival. For
me, it was childbirth classes…

Round One

We are at the hospital’s four-session course about childbirth. The room is chock full of rotund ladies and their husbands.

The
nurse who is teaching the class has grown children. I’d prefer to talk
to someone who carries recent scars… I mean memories… of the joy of
childbirth. To chafe me even more, she is wearing a waist-cinching
belt. I don’t think anyone in this room can imagine fitting in a belt
again. This woman is cruel. I want to run her over with my car.

(click title for more)

Originally published at Coming 2 Terms by Pamela Jeanne

Sometimes I’m asked why we stopped pursuing infertility treatment. For
those looking for easy answers you won’t find them here. There was no
epiphany, no dramatic denouement. We were not driven there by a
deadline or a master plan or even an entirely drained bank account.
(Even today, resisting the ever-beckoning siren song of the fertility
industry’s latest advancements has not been particularly easy.)

Our
move away from treatment was a long, slow often circuitous process that
sometimes led us back like a junkie in need of a fix to the
reproductive endocrinology clinic for one more attempt. A little voice
in my head kept egging me on (no pun intended): just one more IUI; one
more round of acupuncture; one more laparoscopy; one more blood test to
determine if there’s a new factor we hadn’t considered or addressed –
all the while the doctors scratched their heads with no clear
explanation for our infertility, dampening our hopes further that we’d
ever succeed.

Strung-out and wondering how we would possibly
cope with another failed cycle, I started to allow myself to imagine a
life not driven by 28-day cycles and endless associated vigils. With
the benefit of lots of exhaustive and exhausting conversations,
and after consuming huge amounts of reading material on coping with
infertility, my husband and I finally began to loosen the tight grip we
had on our increasingly fragile dream.

(click title for more)

Originally published on For Me For Once

Jackson will be two soon. Samantha will be five in January. They are
the brightest parts of my life (along with my husband), and I can’t
remember my life without them. But I CAN, and do, remember being
pregnant with both of them. The time that I carried each of them was
sweet, fun, exciting, depressing, painful, overwhelming, scary,
life-changing and meaningful, all at once. Some days I look back on my
pregnancies with each of them and think “Dear God, how did I do that
twice?” and at other moments I wonder why everyone doesn’t have twelve.
For some reason I’m thinking a lot lately about being pregnant, or
rather NOT being pregnant, and how I feel about that, and I’ll tell you
why. (NO, it’s not because I am pregnant, so you can leave that thought
by the side of the road. Seriously. No seriously, knock it off - I am
NOT pregnant again. Fine, whatever. Think what you want.)

Here’s
why. Right now, Jackson is the age that Samantha was when we conceived
him. Just a couple of months before she turned two, we decided it might
be nice to give her a sibling fairly soon. I had always wanted my kids
to be two to three years apart, and I’m not even sure why. Part of me
wanted one child to be at least close to being out of diapers before
the next came along. Part of me wanted one who could at least bring me
a diaper for the other, if not actually change it. For some reason it
all seemed to center around diapers. That’s kind of jacked up, now that
I think about it. Hmm. Surely there must have been other reasons.

Whatever.
Regardless, we wanted them two to three years apart. And by “we” I mean
“me-and-Greg-who-showed-up-when-I-asked-him-to-with-sperm-at-the-ready”.

(click title for more)

Originally published on Anne Nahm

Dear Diary,

I could tell the moment I woke up: Today was going to be a day like
no other. The sun was shining and birds were chirping. I knew because
guess what? My wrapping was open! I don’t think that’s ever happened
before.

(click title for more)

Originally published on Krississippi, the Fifty First State of the Union

Another adoptive parent blogger wrote about her son’s adoption not being ’second best’ compared to having a biological child, and it got me thinking about my son’s adoption.

The fact that my FIRST choice in “how to become a parent” was to adopt (totally bypassing the very idea of doing it the ‘natural’ way) is an abstract concept that is often misunderstood…

… but I don’t feel guilty that my son was adopted.

As far as stereotypes go, I’m probably the MOST hated ‘adopter’ (at least in the anti-adoption world) in that I’m simply seen as ‘baby stealer’ - my child came to me as a first choice and I had no intentions in my lifetime (for as far back as I can remember!) to ever have a biological child.

(click title for more)

Originally posted on: Xbox4NappyRash

Dear Spencer,

I know you are only one among millions down there,
but you’re the one I feel I have a connection with, the one I can talk
to. I see you as a leader among men. Well, semen at least.

We’ve been through a lot together, you, your buddies and me. Remember the first time we met? That was an eye opener, certainly was for my stuffed animals anyway.

Over
the next few years we had lot of good times, we met up with each other
at every opportune moment, and quite a few inopportune ones.

In fact, to date, I can only think of one single occasion where we met that wasn’t entirely pleasurable.

But things are changing…I’m not gonna butter you up, I’m gonna tell it to you straight. You need to get your act together down there and get your crew in order.

Lets look at the facts.

(click title for more)