Keeping the Faith

Sometimes you need to have faith in someone else’s faith. I learned this one Christmas Eve eight years ago.

The pain had started the day before. Twingy cramps that left me doubled-over. After a morning spent seizing my side in agony, I drove to Urgent Care. A young, harried doctor doctor checked me over.

“Could you be pregnant?” he asked.

“No.” I snapped. “I’m doing fertility treatments and I took a pregnancy test yesterday. I’m not pregnant.”

I’m not pregnant. Words I’d said so many times to myself in the past year and a half, I was surprised how much it hurt to say them out loud.

I don’t know if it was the anger, hurt, or challenge in my eyes, but the doctor immediately stopped his line of questioning and wrote me a prescription for stomach flu medication.

After filling the prescription, I called Josh.

“What does it say on the bottle?” he asked. “Does it say it’s okay to take if you’re pregnant?”

“Of course it says not to take it if you’re pregnant. All medicine says that,” I snapped.

“Just don’t take it tonight, okay? Take another test tomorrow and if it’s still negative, then take it.”

I seethed inside.

Unlike many couples, our decision to pursue fertility treatment had been mostly Josh’s decision. When we realized that achieving pregnancy would be difficult, I persuaded him to take adoption classes. I just wanted a child, I didn’t care how. Adoption, while emotionally draining, seemed like an eventual sure bet. Fertility treatment looked like a black hole of uncertainty.

But Josh had insisted.

“I want to try, just one time,” he said. He knew he was asking for something big, something he physically could not do. My body would have to undergo the pokes and prods and shots. We fought, one of the only times in our marriage we’ve actually yelled at each other.

And in the end, he won. A little.

“One time,” I said. “December. If it doesn’t work, we’re filling out adoption papers in January.”

He agreed to my terms, and like cautious diplomats who’ve reached a shaky peace agreement, we underwent our first IUI treatment. Ten days later, I took a pregnancy test. One bright pink line stared back at me.

“It’s negative,” I told Josh, deflated. We hugged each other and cried. Another negative pregnancy test. Another family Christmas with no news.

The next day the cramps started, eventually sending me to Urgent Care and to my dining room table, staring at a bottle of medicine that warned me not to take if pregnant.

Again, I bent to Josh’s request. I left the bottle on the table that night.

The next morning–Christmas Eve–I woke early to take a second test.

This time I noticed something different. While the one bright pink line was still clearly there, I thought I saw the faint whisperings of a second line.

“I can’t tell,” I said.

Josh squinted at the white stick, holding it close to the light.

“Me neither.”

We drove to the nearest pharmacy to buy the more expensive, digital test, the kind we’d stopped investing in over the past year.

I took the test and set it on the bathroom counter to let it process.

Josh and I sat on the living room couch, barely breathing, barely talking.

After five minutes, we looked at each other.

“You go,” I whispered. “You check it.”

He left the room and came back seconds later, tears in his eyes, a gray plastic stick in his hand.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, handing the stick to me.

One word looked back at me, changing my life forever: Pregnant.

To all of the moms who are currently undergoing fertility treatments or thinking of adoption to start their family… know that I am holding on to faith for you. Because sometimes it’s not possible to have it yourself when you are deep in the trenches. But, I’ve got you, especially this time of year… I’ve got you.