I'm so bad at this

So, I told someone.  I know, you're not supposed to tell people.  But I told someone.  I was FREAKING OUT and I needed to be talked off a ledge, so I told someone who is removed enough from my every day life and couldn't possibly slip and tell any family, or any other close friends.  I told someone who was also a mom, who had gone through all of this relatively recently and who would relate to some of the reasons I was freaking out, but not make me feel like a terrible person for it.  This friend is also someone who has been asking us for YEARS when we were going to have kids.  My husband jokingly responded to her question with "Some day" and she said "Sunday?  I heard Sunday.  You should have a kid on Sunday".  This was probably four or five years ago.  So, I sent her a text that just said "It's Sunday".  She didn't need more explanation.

I then proceeded to explain how badly I had freaked out, and how much I was still freaking out under the surface, and how we hadn't told anyone but I kind of needed to tell her because she wouldn't get crappy with me because my first moments weren't those of sheer joy and elation.  I also said I was a little nervous that it wouldn't be cute, and that I'm not sure I'm a good enough person to say "Oh, it's beautiful no matter what it looks like".  I can't stress enough what a very not good person I am.  She at least said she had the same thoughts when she had her kids, and that it's totally ok to want it to be cute.  So, maybe I'm a less shitty person than I thought.

But still, there are thoughts back there.  Like, if tiny fetus decides to abandon ship in the next few weeks, I'm not sure I'll be able to say "Oh, this happens, we can try again".  Sure, I'm not jumping up and down with excitement or anything because I'm a control freak who is really afraid of all this change, but I'm also not reaching for the coat hanger or anything.  I don't know that I'll be able to accept that my lack of joy and excitement didn't play into the ship abandonment.  I don't know that I'll be able to sit there and honestly say "This was a fluke, it had nothing to do with me", because like......I wasn't the movie mom from the start.  I wasn't picking out baby names.  I wasn't doing all of those mom things.  I was mostly just not talking too much about it, and doing a lot of this:

That's not what good moms are supposed to do.  This thing isn't even fully formed out of tadpole shape, and here I am, fucking it up already.  

And I told someone before I was supposed to tell someone.

I'm already so bad at this.

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Well, fuck

Throughout my marriage, children have always been something that my husband liked the idea of - in theory.  We liked the idea of having our own family, and of being parents, but we both had so many things we wanted to accomplish before we started walking that road toward parenthood.  We had this belief that we wanted to go into it with no regrets.  We didn't want to have kids, raise them, end up financially strapped by paying for college and all the rest of it, and then some day sit around saying "I regret that we have never been able to travel".  We didn't want to be those parents who hadn't lived for ourselves before we began living for our children.  I think we both saw a lot of people do that, and we both thought that we wanted to have life experiences and memories that tied us together before children so that when those kids some day move out, we still have our life as a couple, and our shared interests to continue forward with.  We didn't want to build a life that was crafted on a foundation of caring for children, because some day those children would leave, and then what would hold our lives together?  So, we waited.  And we waited.  And life kept getting more complicated.  And more and more fears started cropping up for us, particularly around our abilities to be good parents, and the difficulties our families posed for us in general.  So we waited some more.  All of this time waiting gave me more time to move from reluctant to outright terrified.  I'm not joking.  The discussion would leave me in tears.  I don't want to become one of those women who didn't know how to talk about anything but her baby.  I don't want to give up everything I enjoy because that's what society seems to expect mothers to do.  Not to mention the reluctance to resign myself to puking for weeks on end, or to getting grotesquely fat with the potential of never losing the "baby weight" again.  And we won't even get into my deep seeded fears that I have no business parenting anyone because I am likely guaranteed to fuck up my children and make them hate me.  No, we won't even begin to open that can of worms.

So then my husband and I had a discussion.  An all night discussion.  Literally, all night.  We talked from 11:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. about how scared we both were, and exactly what had us so afraid.  We talked, and talked, and cried, and talked.  Then the next day we talked some more and decided it's kind of like ripping off a band-aid.  Maybe we just had to do it and see what happened.  I'm not going to pretend I wasn't terrified at that decision, but at least it was a decision instead of waiting in limbo.  So we ripped off the band-aid.

Fast forward to 6 months later, when I start functioning like a broken typewriter and skip a period.  Well, for a moment, it wasn't necessarily skipped.  It was possibly just late.  So I took a test, which returned a big fat negative.  Sweet.  Let me go enjoy this margarita.  But then, a week later, still no period.  No period, and my boobs, which had been getting sore for a couple of weeks now were getting SUPER sore, and felt huge.  That's weird.  So I took another test, and this time that little blue plus sign took no time to appear.  Seriously, those tests say wait for 2 minutes but I only needed about 15 seconds.  I still waited the full 2 minutes.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe I thought it was confused and would change?  I don't know.  But after the 2 minutes, when it didn't change its mind, I just sort of walked out and showed my husband and said something like "So....that".  Then I burst into tears.  Not happy tears.  Anxious, terrified, panicked tears.  I know, not the reaction most people want to admit to, but I'm not good at sugar coating things.  I immediately began envisioning all of the ways I was going to ruin this, and all of the family arguments that were going to come up because of it, and started getting anxious about the idea of telling family, or my boss, or like....anyone.  I entertained the idea of fleeing the country to avoid the whole thing.  I started thinking about what a disastrous parent I would probably be, and how the kid will love my husband because he's always the nice guy and I'll be the evil disciplinarian and it will hate me.  I started to panic, and I continued to panic for two more days.  I'm not good at change, or with things I don't have 100% control over.  This is both.  I'm still scared half to death, mostly of ruining this thing's life, but also that it will grow up and know that my first moments weren't of joy and wonder.  That I didn't immediately run out and begin looking at nurseries and picking out baby names like they do in movies.  No, the first thing that I, its terrible mother, did was panic and cry.  The next thing I did was go for a run to burn off the anxiety, and then I came home and cried in the shower.  Then I cried the next day as well.  Now, I think I'm past crying, but the anxiety is still there, in the background.  I am clearly not a movie mom.

We still haven't told anyone, we are waiting until we're past a danger zone.  Maybe it'll take other people being happy for us to relieve some of the anxiety for me.  Or maybe it'll never go away, because I really don't want to fuck this all up.

But, either way, here we go...

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