so maybe. maybe not.

Last Thursday I planned to take a test. I’m not very good at tests. I panic a bit. I think I know everything and yet, when faced with the need to answer, I freeze. But this test was going to be easy and, in all honesty, I was looking forward to it with an anticipation that grew daily.

That anticipation was especially great last Sunday as I sat in church. I have a tough time concentrating in church as it is, but last Sunday was particularly hard. Everywhere I looked, I was face to face with the answers to the test I was anxious to take. I’d look to one side and spot one, then the other. That has to be a sign I’m going to do well, I convinced myself. But, for further assistance, I turned toward that which I used to always turn to at test time, and I bowed my head, closed my eyes and prayed. I prayed to pass.

On Tuesday, my test was cancelled, when, more than two weeks late, my period finally arrived and quashed the need tick two minutes off of my life in anticipation for something I know I want, and, sadly, think I must start accepting is never going to happen for me again.

Here’s where I tell you typing that sentence up there is tough, what with the tears that sneak up on me. Sure, they’re not long-lasting tears. I blink a few times, and PRESTO! They’re gone. They’ve had company, though. They join the ones that filled my eyes as I watched a baby find solace in the hollow of his mother’s neck and drift off into that instantaneous newborn sleep last Sunday at church, and they are familiar with the others that fell in the shower Tuesday morning as I pressed my forehead against the slippery walls and gave myself the quick acceptance pep talk.

In short, I wanted to be pregnant. To be even shorter, I’m not. This disappoints me more than I imagined it would. Probably because spending so much time imagining what it would be like to have a new baby in the house again prevented me from thinking about the real possibility I wasn’t going to be doing that.

Maybe not soon. Maybe not this coming year. Maybe the following. Maybe not ever.

There are a lot of maybes in whether or not my husband and I will have more children. Maybe I’ve had my opportunities and, my God, how I love them! I know I’m lucky to have had three opportunities to have had children, and from those, I was blessed with two really great sons. Maybe now, though, I have to start the slow acceptance process – the mourning process, really – of not being tested at this new motherhood thing ever again while we figure out the answers to the other tests the maybes present.