The Relief of Rain

For the past week, there has been an insufferable heat wave in the South that has made everyone grumpy and cantankerous - including me and my husband. He's the incomprehensible sort that needs the heat to be on 90 degrees in the winter, but 75 degrees in the summer. I'll never understand the discrepancy, but suffice it to say that the man is GRUUUUUUMPY when he doesn't get enough sleep; and the temperature in our house has been inconsistent with sleep.

July was a rough month for us all around. This was the month baby number 2 was due, a fact I remember only because 2 babies -whose mothers got pregnant around the same time I did - were born this month. Also, my husband and I have been to 2 therapy sessions together, trying to sort through the "TTC again" question. I'm an old hand at therapy - he is not. In fact, he had never been to therapy before. But we had reached such a place of breakdown that we couldn't wade through our emotions without a mediator.

You see, since the last miscarriage (#3), I bounced back into hope pretty quickly, while, despite agreeing to proceed with specialists and diagnostic procedures, he stayed in a pretty firm "over-my-dead-body" position (or so it felt). He was not willing to take a firm stance either way, and I figured he just needed more time to sort through his feelings and regroup from the last loss. Now - I am a fairly emotional woman (could that be redundant?) and he is a pretty stereotypical man - so when it comes to talking about his thoughts and emotions, I get the barest of bare bones delivered piecemeal and only at my prompting . . . and it usually leaves me wanting more information.

But knowing that Grief doesn't bend to anyone's timeline, I tried really really hard to give him room to breath. I tried to focus on my own healing instead - visit doctors, get test results, pay the bills, update my resume and online portfolio, proceed with our plans for an addition, go to my own therapy sessions, etc.

But when the last test result came in (thromobophilia panel: normal; karyotpye: normal; hysterosalpingogram: normal) I was ready to have a "come to Jesus" talk. By then, it had been 2 months since the miscarriage - a.k.a. 2 full cycles/2 spent eggs. I needed something more than, "Let's just wait till we get more information," and, "I have some thinking to do." But all he was able to offer was more of the same.

At this point, it gets way messy and super-emotional. Basically, I felt tricked and betrayed because I had always been up-front about wanting a family from the very beginning of our relationship and I felt he was unilaterally making decisions about my life without allowing me any say in the matter. He thought I wasn't giving him enough credit for the three times we DID try and that I was giving him an ultimatum - either I get what I want or I am leaving. We were basically in "me" land and needed a map back to "we" land. So off to therapy we went.

Our therapist visits have been fruitful and have begun to accomplish what I hoped - the ability for us to HEAR one another and try to compromise by sacrificing some of what each of us wants. I think we will try again (my needs), but this will be our last time (his needs). Ugh - life is hard.

The rain finally came today and the relief everywhere is palpable. Humans, plants and animals alike are breathing sigs of relief. I'm hoping the rain foreshadows some relief on our lives as well.