last week, i thought i was pregnant.
like SERIOUSLY thought i was pregnant. every day i was getting an upset stomach at the same time. i was exhausted on a level that seriously made me feel leg-buckling faint and my mood swings were crazy. i was crying about stupid stuff at the drop of a hat. it made no sense, except when i did my typical google diagnosis and realized that these were all fairly typical symptoms of early pregnancy.
[i hadn't missed a period. i hadn't missed anything. i'd just decided that was the answer.]
i was excited at first. the timing, were it to be a surprise, would be good because spring semester would be over. it would be a beast of a spring, but it would be doable. we really love the idea of kids, so it was exciting to imagine.
i couldn't really take the suspense, so i took a test on wednesday night.
[side note: someone told me this would happen. someone told me that i would think that i was pregnant every month for a while, that it was just part of the process of adjusting to a new life with new possibilities that weren't ever possibilities before. they were RIGHT.]
yeah. SO not pregnant.
i felt so stupid. i can't even tell you how stupid i felt. like monumentally, how could you not be sane and stable, yelling at myself internally, i wasted two days fretting about this when i could have been accomplishing something productive stupid.
[yeah, that also was incredibly productive, let me tell you.]
thursday and friday proceeded to hit me like a mack truck of awful. it was a truck destined to teach me, i think, that i'm not ready. or perhaps just to show me that the Lord's timing is better than mine and not to guess at what He has in store.
or maybe just to teach me that all that people say about needing time to adjust to being married is right. because, you know, a lot of people have told me that marriage is hard. that's not been my experience. i don't think marriage is hard. i don't think living with my best friend and waking up with him and negotiating bathroom time and who's going to do the dishes is hard.
i think LIFE is hard. jobs are hard. figuring out how to be a little better every day is hard. making mistakes, admitting them, and changing is hard. confronting my own expectations, selfishness, and frailties is hard. letting someone serve me is hard.
life is hard. marriage is what you make it. so while i appreciate the motivation for people telling me that it's normal to wake up and wonder if getting married was the right decision, encouraging me to put my foot down about things before bad habits begin, and cautioning me that the first year is just something to survive, i would like to respectfully suggest that such is not always the case.
[and to respectfully extract myself from such conversations as quickly as possible while solemnly promising to myself and to Heavenly Father that my advice will always be positive to newly engaged and newly married folks. sheesh.]
marriage is as individual as the people within it. there's no one-size-fits-all truth about marriage and the first year or the first months or when you should have a baby or how you should handle money or any of the whole host of things that people like to pontificate about.
but this week has taught me my truth--if marriage is what you make of it, we need some time to create and refine ours into whatever it will be. and i need to enjoy it while i have it, rather than looking so far ahead that i forget to see the awesome that's right in front of me. for that lesson, i am thankful for the mack truck of awful.
[and with that horrible metaphor, i will put this post out of its misery. they'll get better. i promise.]
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