Hope?

I had a dream two nights ago that a paper airplane hit our bedroom window, and rather than fall away, it continued to nose up against the glass. It took a while before it got my attention, but finally I opened the window, unfolded the paper, and revealed a child's crayon drawing and a happy-silly-rhyming poem about what our family life will be like with a baby. It dawned on me that I might be pregnant, so I did a test, and lo and behold: positive. J~ and I laughed and cried and hugged and marveled at the news.

Then I woke up.

It was Saturday morning and still a few days shy of this month's testing day. I wondered if this was a sign. I did feel crampy, after all, which was one of the most memorable and earliest symptoms in my past short-lived pregnancies. I told J~ about the dream right away, but not until late in the day did I admit that my hopes were up, in spite of my every effort to keep them at bay. He grinned and hugged me. "It's exciting," he said, and admitted that his hopes shot up, too, when I told him about the dream. "I don't think that's a bad thing," he added.

I wasn't so sure, but it was undeniably fun to be excited together.

We got caught up in burrito-making and our arriving dinner guests, and a popcorn-and-peanuts screening of Al Gore's must-see, very sobering and sometimes funny movie, An Inconvenient Truth. (Which, by the way, if you haven't seen, please do. It's important.)

Throughout the evening, the idea that maybe I was pregnant colored my thoughts. I felt extra in-love with J~, extra happy with my life. I took long, deep breaths. I smiled involuntarily. J~ told me later that he felt the same way.

But this morning, my temperature had dropped to its usual pre-menstrual low, and my hopes dropped correspondingly. "But I'm not depressed about it," I told J~.

It's true. I'm not.

My dream still feels like a good sign. Allowing my hopes to rise seems suddenly not foolish, but necessary. How else to shake ambivalence but to embrace desire? How else to move toward a dream except by entertaining unreasonable hope?

I do believe this can happen for us.

As embarrassed and potentially naive as I feel to say so, I do believe it's going to happen.

I'll even go so far as to boldly state that it will happen.

It is happening.

Maybe I'm not pregnant yet, but I'm getting ready for it. We're getting ready for it. We are taking the leap. We are going to have a baby.

...

And if, for some reason, it doesn't happen, we'll have at least sucked all the juices out of the delicious possibility that it could have happened, and that we truly wanted it to happen, and that we went through it together, loving each other all the way.

Speaking of which, I owe you some updates: J~'s appointment yielded no sample, no new information (yet); only a plastic cup and instructions on which lab to take it to once he had it filled. We plan to do the deed Wednesday morning.

My counseling appointment was moderately successful. I got something out of it, in spite of the fact that the counselor did a great deal more talking than I did. I'll probably see her again, but I'm also looking elsewhere for a better match.

More to come, more to come.