Time Warp Tuesday: Decisions

When Kathy over at Bereaved and Blessed announced that this month’s Time Warp Tuesday theme would be decisions, I was immediately intrigued. I knew I wanted to participate though no specific post, or even topic, immediately sprang to mind.

When I did a search on “decisions” in my archives I was met with a most interesting–and eclectic–set of entries; so many different topics, all equally captivating. I could tell it was going to be really hard to decide which topic to tackle.

I was also struck by how many huge issues we had survived, that I had almost completely forgotten about. There were blog dramas and disagreements with my in-laws and uncertainties surrounding my choices as a mother and reflections on couples counseling… oh so many posts about couples counseling. I knew, in the end, I would have to revisit one of those posts just because they made up such a significant percentage of my search results.

Ultimately, I choose one of the posts I wrote during the very dark and difficult time we experienced before we started TTC#2, when we were trying to decide if and when we were even going to have another child. How could I have forgotten how hard it was for us to come to a place of resolution on this hugely divisive issue? How could I have forgotten how hard I fought, and how devastated I felt, when it seemed we would never agree on what to do, when the decision seemed far too difficult, and all seemed exceedingly hopeless.

In the end I choose to revisit, this post, called Two Losses, which describes the utter devastation I felt when we decided–with the help of our couples counselor–to wait 1-2 years to start trying for a second child.

What really touched me about that post was how raw it was, and how vividly it addressed the pain and disappointment we can sometimes feel when making a decision as a couple seems to negate who we are as an individual. At the time I was contemplating giving up my most precious dream in an attempt to secure my relationship. I had never felt so forced to make a decision that I did not personally agree with. The post is about sacrificing who I was to be a part of something bigger. It was about how hard it is to know what to do when you love someone as much as you love yourself.

Relationships are so hard. When big decisions have to be made and two people don’t agree, they can feel impossible. During those many months that we stood at the crossroads of trying–or waiting–to have another baby, I wondered if the decision would tear us apart. I think there were moments when I was sure it would.

When we finally made the decision, it almost broke me. Maybe, in the end, it did. Maybe that is why we ended up making a different decision entirely.

Because, of course, we ultimately decided not to suspend our family building attempts. We didn’t wait another 1-2 years to try for our second child. When I consider our diagnoses of DOR and MFI–and what a 1-2 delay probably would have meant for our family building endeavors–I am filled with a renewed sense of gratitude that we abandoned our original decision and started trying sooner than we had planned. In the end we got that 1-2 years anyway, it just came in the form of secondary infertility and not in a deliberate choice to wait. When I think that we might have never become pregnant again had stuck with our original decision, well the possibility makes me shutter. Revising this dark time gives me yet another reason to believe this pregnancy was meant to be, that it is truly a miracle.

So many of the posts in my search results were about Mi.Vida and I the decisions we’ve had to make. Looking back on all the uncertainty we faced, all the steps we took into the inscrutable unknown, I am reminded of how far we’ve come. Reading those posts I recall how unsure we were that we could ever afford a house or that we should buy one at all. Now we have our forever home and we marvel at how lucky we are to live here. We didn’t know if we should look for other jobs, or if we could even find something that would be right for either of us and today Mi.Vida started a new career that seems to be a perfect fit for both him and our family. We wondered if we should have another child and now we count down the months until our son’s expected arrival.

So many of the big, looming, terrifying decisions have been made. So much uncertainty has been resolved. I know we can’t see into the future and know that the security our decisions have provided us will still be there, but right now, at this moment we are reaping the rewards of what we decided to do. I suppose that is why we feel more confident making decisions as we move forward, because we have the confidence that we can make them well. Sure we’ve made mistakes, we’ve taken missteps, there have been poor choices along with the good, but I stand by each of the really difficult decisions we had to make. And I’m confident that we will be able to navigate all the future decisions that come our way.