The Terror and The Smudge

*This is mildly gross for anyone squeamish*

Friday night, I found the slightest brown smudge when I went to the bathroom. It took me about 9 seconds to freak out and decide I was having another miscarriage. I screamed to my husband: I'm having a miscarriage. That's how sure I was and how much I wanted him to believe me.

Since Friday's smudge, which I don't even think could be classified as spotting, there has been nothing. I haven't called the midwife because I have an appointment tomorrow and most books say to wait until the next appointment if you have had only mild spotting. They say to call immediately if you have had bleeding with cramps. I've decided that the spotting isn't bleeding and that the cramps I felt yesterday were 'normal,' according to the books.

That doesn't mean I don't think I've lost this baby, too. I'm already expecting that when we go on Tuesday to the sonogram, I will be hyperventilating with anxiety when we walk in and weeping when we walk out. It seems suddenly very impossible to me to think that I will ever have a healthy pregnancy. I know this isn't the positive way to think and a large part of me thinks that the only reason I got pregnant again so quickly is because I kept relatively positive last time, but these endless weekends can make my hyperactive mind go into hyperoverdrive.

I don't know what I will do if this pregnancy is not viable either. I think I will take a break for at least a few months from the fertility cycle to get over this heartache and allow my mind to heal. I want to be braced with the worst and be elated when my backup plan doesn't come true.

In college, I took an HIV test because it was the responsible thing to do. In the 3 minutes it took the doctor to go get my results after I'd been seated, I'd decided that if I was positive, I was going to walk straight out of the office, straight to the bus station and find my way to Central America where I would live on a beach and enjoy the sun. I could almost taste my mixed drink when the doctor came back and told me I was negative.

In the times of marriage and mortgage, such escape plans are harder to hatch since reality has this way of coming between me and my mixed drink. I have a job and monthly bills and the like, but part of me is thinking if this baby doesn't take, I need a break from it all. My anxiety of the last year is crushing me and I can't help but think it can't be all that great for my insides.

All of that said, what I want more than anything is to carry this baby to term and have a child with my husband, who I know will be among the best fathers a child could ever hope to have. I just don't want to focus on that joy when the reality seems to me to go the other way.

My husband thinks otherwise.

I can't believe I'm losing this baby, too, I said Saturday when we woke after my terror.

I can't believe it either, he said. As in, I don't believe it.

Time will tell.