Or more aptly put: a post about the fact that nothing is happening. But one, some dear friends encouraged me to share this; two, bigger picture moments aren’t always a celebration, but are rather a marking or noticing of time; and three, sometimes the things that make you want to hide under your writer’s desk are precisely the things you need to write about. So here it goes.
Warning: if you don’t like reading about “women stuff” you might want to go ahead and skip this post.

The calendar pages flip ever inexorably towards May, an innocuous month as far as months go, except for the niggling little reminder in the back of my head that in May of last year, my husband and I decided we were ready to officially go “TTC.” I was gung-ho about it at first, marking and timing, tracking and predicting every possible sign of fertility with scientific precision – I got that doctorate for something right? – until it began to dawn on me that a decade of artificial hormones would not leave my body without a trace, as I suffered the worst cramps of my life and bleeding sufficient enough to send me to the doctor convinced I was having an early miscarriage. (I’d read all about them on WebMD.) A consultation, ultrasound, and internal examination later, the doctor calmly explained to my very red face that what I was experiencing was called my period, otherwise known as menstruation.
I gave up tracking and just submitted myself to the wait for my body to regain some sense of decorum. But the months were ticking by. The more time passed, the more normal my body became, but closer we were getting to Things We’d Like to Do If I Don’t Get Pregnant. Like travel to Hong Kong in January. That trip came and went. Now it’s flying to Berlin to visit Toby’s family. This fall, it will be a trip back home to the States to visit family, go to a writer’s conference, and take part in our friends’ wedding. It’s a tricky time where, if I don’t get pregnant, we get to do awesome and important (to us) things. But that means I will still be walking around sans bebe. It leads to an awkward stage where we’re trying, but kind of not.
This trying-but-not-very-hard means I don’t know if I actually have a fertility issue, or if we’ve just managed to avoid getting me pregnant. It also means I’m left wondering if, despite all doctors’ claims that it is a nonissue, the pill was a bad choice after all and maybe I should have stuck with options that didn’t involve messing with hormonal imbalances. {Insert guilt.} I also wonder if, irony of ironies, waiting those years to get educated, financially secure, settled in marriage, and emotionally ready to be great parents meant I missed the fertility window for motherhood. {Did I mention guilt?} And I wonder if the fact that we want to take these trips to visit family we haven’t seen in nearly two years means I’m still putting selfish desires in front of a (hypothetical) baby and therefore still unready to be a mother. {Oh hai, Mme. Guilt! Come sit by me.}
Most days, I try not to think about it and what with moving to a foreign country, a healthy supply of visitors, working on my book, and doing work with SOLD, I’ve had enough on my plate to keep me distracted. But then I’ll be in the grocery store and spy a colorful little worktable and imagine myself sitting down with a large-eyed, towheaded son or daughter and a palette of paints or scrap wood dino construction kit and I feel a twinge. Or I’ll see a sakura bloom sling and imagine our little one in a sling of our own, and there that twinge is again. Or I’ll look at my husband and wonder what blend of his features and mine we would produce, and the twinge becomes more like an ache.
Most days, I manage not to be too worried, thinking we still have time, and we’ll get really serious about trying after our trip in the fall. I know there are fertility clinics too, and options. This isn’t the 1800’s where a woman having difficulty getting pregnant is labeled “barren.”
But some days that word, barren, is exactly how I feel.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take,
but by the moments that take our breath away.”
- Author Unknown
What moments stole your breath away this week?
Each Thursday, we come together to celebrate living life with intention by capturing a glimmer of the bigger picture through a simple moment. Have you found yourself in such a moment lately? Share it with us!










Mothers are tillers of the earth,

I’m sure we’ve all heard of penis envy (Oh Freud, did you ever even talk to a woman, really?) But is there such a thing as womb envy? Do men ever feel envious that they cannot bear life? That the powerful changes and emotions of the pregnancy experience is something they can only try to imagine? Certainly, they provide a necessary and vital function in the creation, protection, and rearing of future generations. But they never feel another heartbeat beside their own. Nor do they feel the warm glow of new life within.