My Journey Begins

I will never forget glancing down at the results window of the dollar store pregnancy test, expecting the typical negative indicator. What I saw instead read positive and yet, it was kind of like when you have your mouth set for water and you take a drink of milk. It takes your brain a minute. Almost like my eyes couldn't get the signal to my brain right away. When they did, I sat down on the toilet lid and let everything sink in. Wow. Forty-two years old, I wasn't trying to get pregnant and I thought this supreme joy in life was over for me. Would never come around again and yet, like a crocus bloom in a Wyoming winter, here it was. Several dollar store tests later, I settled into the possibility that, for women like me for whom motherhood is the greatest joy in life, I had just hit the $300 million lottery jackpot. I was going to have another baby. My oldest was soon to be fourteen and my youngest, eleven. A mother of boys I cherished and enjoyed, I yearned for the experience of mothering a daughter. Maybe this was it. Maybe God had seen my clinical depression and lonliness and this was His way of affirming me as a parent, though I frequently felt like an abject failure. This was a new chance to correct every mistake I had ever made as a mom, to start over and to do things exactly right this time.