7 Test and a whole hell of alot of water later.............

     A friend just gave birth last week.  I was talking to her on the phone the other night and she was expressing her shock and awe at how she could love something so intensely and so passionately without having known them for years.  Of course this conversation took me right back to the night I laid my eyes on my son for the first time, a perfect little 3 lb boy.  This mixed the with the anniversary of my grandfathers death approaching took me back to one of the happiness and saddest times of my life.

     We had tried for 8 years to have a baby.  Doctors, Fertility treatments, test after test, and every month, every no,  was a bitter slap in the face to me.  On my 4th wedding anniversary I even begged my husband to leave me, thinking he was young enough to meet someone and have the family I seemed unable to give him (to which he stormed out and returned later with the ugliest sickliest puppy you have ever seen, but that's a story for another time).  

     Ever since I can remember I wanted to be a mother.  Before bed every night I would tuck in my dolls and sing and kiss them to sleep.  While other kids were playing at being doctors and firemen I was in my play kitchen calling them all to dinner of mud pies as their devoted mother.  It was who I was, who I wanted to be.  "You're thinking about it too much" people would say "your trying to hard" said others "just forget about it".  Tell me how I would beg of them, tell me how to stop dreaming and wishing for the thing you've always wanted?  Our parents teach us at a young age to never give up on our dreams and mine was to hold my own child in my arms.  After 8 years of begging, pleading bartering with God, my husband and I decided it was time to discuss adoption.  The thought excited me and saddened me at the same time.  I was delighted at the thought of saving a child, of being a mother, but the thought of never having the ever growing tummy, of feeling my baby kick from deep inside of me, it was ........for lack of better words...heartbreaking.

     I felt like I was disappointing everyone.  My husband desperately wanted to be a father, my parents and his longed for a grandchild.  Friends who didn't know our struggles would ask "so when you going to start a family" like  just being my husband and I wasn't one already.  Everything somehow felt....less.

     It was in the spring of 2008 I received a phone call from my mother and father, my grandfather had been taken to the hospital and they did not expect him to make it back home.  He had slowly been degenerating for 6 years, suffering from what seemed like a million different conditions in slow silence.  

     I was extremely close to my grandfather.  My mother (my hero) worked 3 jobs off and on as I grew up to keep us fed and clothed which often left us at my grandparents which,  was luckily 15 mins up the road.  They were so much more then grandparents, they were my childhood, a zillion wonderful memories and a second set of parents.

     I rushed to be at my grandfathers side.  I would do the hour and a half drive every couple of days, sitting at his bed side as he slowly grew worse and worse with each visit.  We filled the hours talking of his past, my future, my childhood.  Every visit would end the same way.  I would lean over and kiss his cheek as I took his hand and say "I love you grampy" to which he would smirk as he patted my hand and say "I kind of like you too kid"  A line I heard my whole life which I knew to mean I love you too.  during this time I began to feel my body grown sluggish, my stomach would turn on a moments notice, I couldn't sleep, but who could with so much going on?  What really was bothering was this hard little knot I could feel deep in my stomach, a weight like something was sitting on top of my uterus.  It was this feeling that forced me while at the grocery store to bite the bullet and buy a pregnancy test.  I figured things would work out the way they always seemed to, the moment I took the test my period would start and this feeling would leave me.  I drank a bottle of water on the way home and ran to the bathroom without telling my husband.

     The window turned pink instantly and within seconds the plus sign appeared.  I stood there for a moment my eyes filling with tears...what a cruel joke I thought.  Little did I know there is no such thing as a false positive, if you have the hormone in you you are pregnant or where pregnant recently.  I stormed out of the bathroom and thrust the test beneath my husbands nose who was putting way to much salt on a cucumber.  "we need to go back" I snapped.  I remember him looking to the test and then to me as he put a hand out to steady himself "I knew you were pregnant" he said joyously.  This only seemed to piss me off more.  Hadn't he gone through the last 8 years with me?  Didn't he know we couldn't get pregnant?  How dare he get excited by this only to have me watch his hopes crumble when it proved not true.  

"you knew?" I asked scornfully 

"you've been so bitchy lately" he replied.  Believe it or not I just grabbed my things and walked out to the car, I didn't punch him in the head!

3 more tests later and what seemed like a dozen classes of water, I had 4 pregnancy tests in front of me, all with a pretty pink plus sign.  My husband was doing a little dance and trying as hard as he could to not call everyone he knew while I grumbled.  Surely my city had gotten in a bad supply of pregnancy tests and every pharmacy was effected.  I had to go back one more time and get a different brand.  I marched determined into the pharmacy and walked up to the pharmacist.  It took everything in me to calmly explain my situation.

"Miss its 9pm" she told me when I explained that maybe the problem was that I wasn't peeing on those damn sticks in the morning.  "if you have enough of the hormone to register now you certainly are pregnant"

I burst into tears, right there among the condoms and pregnancy tests.  the pharmacist put her arm around me and whispered "I'm sorry" it was only between sobs that I explained how long we had been trying.  I grabbed 3 more tests, still not willing to take her word for it, and a 4 liter bottle of water and headed for the cash.

The next morning I had 7 positive pregnancy tests and an appointment with our OBGYN who confirmed what the test had already told us.....we were expecting a little miracle.

My parents got the first phone call, followed by my grandmother.  2 days later we headed up to see my grandfather.  I'll never forget the look on his face as I walked into the room, his body was shutting down and all of him hurt to move but as I stepped up to his bed he reached out his arms and placed his hands on my stomach.  

"Nanny told you?" I asked proudly to which my grandfather replied "thats not a baby thats a tad pole" (my husband is french)

My grandfather and I spent that visit talking about the type of mother I wanted to be, the hopes and dreams I had for the baby growing inside of me, How I would some day read him the Kipling stories my grandfather once read to me.  I watched his face light up and his eyes tear when i told him if it was a boy I was going to name him after my uncle, his youngest son, who died when I was 6 months.  When it was time to lean I leaned in and kissed his cheek as he took my hand "I love you grampy" I told him "I love you too Mary-Anne" he said.  I didn't think of it at the time, but he told me good bye that day, those were the last words he ever said to me.

My last day talking to him was on a Sunday, by Tuesday he was in a medical induced sleep and he died early Wednesday morning.  6 years later i still feel the loss just as strongly.  Not a day goes by where I don't look at my grandfathers picture and wish he was here to see how much my son has grown, how he has that sharp wit my grandfather had, and this amazing thrist for knowledge that my grandfather so admired.  His passing to this day is one of the most traumatic and life altering moments in my life and I know were it not for that little life inside of me it may have taken much longer for me to recover from the loss.

My grandmother use to tell me that we may not understand why God says no, or his timing but in his own time God would make these things clear to us.  I received an answer to a 8 year prayer at a time when everyone in my family needed it the most.

For the record, I did name him after my uncle and in loving honor of my grandfather, How the Elephant got his Trunk by Rudyard Kipling is one of his favorites, as it was mine.  And every now and then, even tho its well beyond his years I read to him of my grandfathers favorite poet Robert Service.

I am grateful for God blessing me during a time of my greatest sorrow, I'm grateful for my grandfathers last words to me, and I am so grateful that I got to grow up with him being my Grampy.

A Little Prayer

Let us be thankful, Lord, for little things -
The song of birds, the rapture of the rose;
Cloud-dappled skies, the laugh of limpid springs,
Drowned sunbeams and the perfume April blows;
Bronze wheat a-shimmer, purple shade of trees -
Let us be thankful, Lord of Life, for these!

Let us be praiseful, Sire, for simple sights; -
The blue smoke curling from a fire of peat;
Keen stars a-frolicking on frosty nights,
Prismatic pigeons strutting in a street;
Daisies dew-diamonded in smiling sward -
For simple sights let us be praiseful, Lord!

Let us be grateful, God, for health serene,
The hope to do a kindly deed each day;
The faith of fellowship, a conscience clean,
The will to worship and the gift to pray;
For all of worth in us, of You a part,
Let us be grateful, God, with humble heart.

Robert W Service