It’s been a rough five days. Five days. I sit here asking myself: is that all it’s been? I feel like screaming. Crying. Vomiting. Punching something. But mostly I’m just frustrated. I cannot control this. I cannot control how things turn out in the end. Five days since my first positive pregnancy test, an early result I might add, and I’m taking more and more tests like a mad woman – taking photographs of every line on every test and measuring its darkness compared to the one before. Obsessed.

When I was pregnant with my first two, I was never able to get a dark line, even on the first and second day of my missed period. I’d wait until then to test back in those days. And in both cases, everything was just fine. I didn’t buy 200 dollars worth of tests just to confirm…just to sit there hoping and praying the test line sucked all the color out of the control line so I could start relaxing, maybe even wondering if there was twins? How strange and funny that I obsess now but back in those days I wanted to be a mother more than anything just like now, but I just waited like everyone else for the first appointment without obsessing over tests. Now things feel so different. I’m 39. My first two are now 10 and 14. I’ve had three miscarriages in eight years and now I can’t seem to shake the feeling that something will always be wrong. James is now jaded as well and refuses to get his hopes up. I feel lost. I feel lost in a sea of light positive lines on ten different tests and miscarriage memories coming back to haunt me and the clock ticking away in my ear telling me that we’ve made it one more day, but maybe not tomorrow. I wish I could let go. Just let go completely and let whatever will be, be.

I ask myself again and again WHY I can’t do that. Why is it I’m the type of person that cannot just focus on what’s in front of her, not ten years into the future, or in this case, nine months into the future where I get to hold my child…finally. Fear of loss makes me try to control this. But I know, if I’m going to lose this pregnancy I’m going to lose it, there’s no way around it. While I’m tempted to get my blood drawn this time around just to get a gauge for sure what is there (I’ve got a whole battery of tests waiting for me at the lab, just to torture me further with the wait and the phone call saying, “Well, your levels are not as high as we’d like”), part of me just wants to skip it. If this pregnancy is going to fail, it’s going to fail. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Even the darkest lines in the world didn’t help my last pregnancy from not being viable, well into the first trimester. I was so happy seeing those dark lines and then when it came time to see the heartbeat, nothing…not even an echo.

I am going to skip the blood tests. I am going to try and forget what might or might not be happening inside me right now. Two days into this pregnancy, “officially late”, and I’m already a worried mess.

Time to let go…and just be.