Ready

Come on, ladies, how could I be pregnant? I have an early research project to defend, a semester to finish with five papers left to write, a poster presentation to prepare for early June, two different publications in progress with my advisor, and that's not even the whole of it. I also have 15 years' experience with licit and effective means of avoiding pregnancy, and a husband who is 100% on board with not having a baby at this time. I can't be pregnant.

I'm pregnant.

I go back and forth between the two implausible possibilities. (TMI warning, for people who  know me IRL; you may want to skip down a couple of paragraphs while I chat with strangers on the internet about my sex life.) Did it happen EIGHT DAYS before my temperature shifted, on a day that was clearly infertile, or FIVE DAYS post-peak with three days of a thermal shift? Neither, right? Gametes don't live that long. Especially not 37-year-old saggy withered eggs, doddering toward perimenopause.

I am imagining a little Lance Armstrong-inspired swimmer, charging forward through the barren Alps with a miniature bicycle helmet and perhaps a teeny "Live Strong" bracelet on his -- oh, never mind about the details. The environment is hostile, the journey punishing, but he perseveres. Around the final bend he spies the egg at last! She says, in her tart old lady voice, "What do you think you're doing, whippersnapper? Get that bicycle helmet away from my zona pellucida!"

If you followed a population of NFPing couples for a year, you'd see the occasional pregnancy resulting from similarly unlikely circumstances. I understand that -- improbable pregnancies happen in large enough groups. But this one is happening in me, and I am boggled. I am curious about the probability that an individual 37-year-old woman would conceive in a single cycle while using NFP cautiously -- 1 in 10,000 at most, I would guess, and perhaps an order of magnitude smaller.

I took a second pregnancy test an hour before the awards ceremony. The first one, at 15dpo, had been negative and I had persuaded myself that I had an NSAID-induced luteinized unruptured follicle. Thanks to shingles, I had taken a truckload of NSAIDs in the preceding three weeks. (That negative test is why I don't think the most reasonable explanation, five-day sperm life plus ovulation three days before the temperature shift, makes much sense.) I locked myself in the basement bathroom to take the test, where no one would say, "CJ, are those your feet in there? Want to get some dinner before the awards ceremony?" I love the camaraderie in my department but sometimes a person needs a little solitude.

As I watched the test line take faint shape, there was confusion swirling all around me. Hey, a baby! How did that happen? What does it mean for the future? How am I going to get through all the stuff I have to do while I am puking my way through the first trimester?  Everyone in this building is going to think I'm a madwoman. A madwoman who plans poorly. Hello in there, baby. How ON EARTH did you happen? But I believe that God authors life. And I believe that in any circumstance, when the 1 turns up instead of the 9,999, it's wisest to look beyond the swirls of confusion and see instead his own fingerprint.

And here is a second fingerprint: I went upstairs to the lab to do some baffled googling ("Lance Armstrong wannabe causes improbable pregnancy what now?") and thought back to the date that the thermal shift started so I could count forward to a due date. It was...March 25, Feast of the Annunciation. I mean, honestly. What can a Catholic woman do with that besides say, "Be it done unto me according to thy word"? (Followed, of course, by speculation that the Blessed Mother was probably pretty startled herself at the time.) It was a much-needed reminder that beautiful things arise from unexpected pregnancies, that it is better to say "Fiat mihi" than "You know, I had a different plan." This baby's womb-nickname is Gabriel (you can call him Baby Gabey if you'd like), and my hope is that he will declare the wisdom of God to a skeptical world for as long as he lives.

That night I was thinking about what it will mean if this pregnancy sticks, and I knew I'd have to decline my fellowship for next year. Continuing to work toward the degree seems reasonable to both Elwood and me -- I love the work, I have lots of practice juggling the needs of small children and my own projects, and he's behind me. But working from home, coding transcripts and running analyses while a baby nurses or naps, is a horse of a different species than continuing to make that drive once or twice a week as my fellowship requires me to do. I just can't do that. I thought about saying, "I know I agreed to co-teach that class for the spring semester, but I'm not going to able to do it after all," and do you know what I felt? Relief. The hardest part of this program has not been the papers and the tests and the deadlines and the tough questions from more experienced researchers. The hardest part has been arranging to be away from home so often, especially getting to campus on time in an old van through winter weather. The sudden appearance of an ironclad reason to stay off that highway next January and February felt like an unexpected gift -- God's oblique thumbprint, perhaps.

So about those prints, the finger-finger-thumb: in some moments, as I look through my glass darkly, it's tempting to see the indistinct fingerprints and say, "WHO is SMUDGING my glass?" But I choose instead to see the traces of a hand extended in blessing. This is not a blessing I sought, but it is one I will welcome.

To anybody reading this who is infertile or subfertile: I imagine that it must be painful to read a post where someone says, "God must have really wanted me to get pregnant!" Why me? Why not you? To Summer and Arwen and Tracy, in particular, I wanted to say that I am praying for you whenever I pause and think about how unlikely this pregnancy is. Which is often.

One last thing, and then I will end this monster post that could really have been just two words ("I'm" + "pregnant"). As I was sitting in the awards ceremony, I kept thinking of the story where God calls someone's name and he answers "Ready!" "Who was that?" I thought. "Not Samuel, but who else could it be? Is it maybe a Greek myth or something?" It niggled at me but I didn't figure it out for a couple of hours -- when I was almost home, it clicked. God said, "Abraham," and Abraham said, "Ready!" He didn't know what God was about to ask of him; he couldn't have had any idea what fruit would spring from his obedience. I am also carrying an unexpected blessing along an unexpected path, and I am doing my best to say, Ready.