Hope & Heartbreak

“About this time next year,” Elisha said, “you will hold a son in your arms.” “No, my lord!” she objected. “Please, man of God, don’t mislead your servant!”

—2 Kings 4:16

Aaron and I stopped “trying” to have a baby, because it was making me crazy and breaking my heart. I needed to get off that hamster wheel for a while, because I felt dizzy and all scraped away on the inside.

For no good reason, one dark morning, I took a pregnancy test. The pregnancy-test people have a racket going because of people like me, crazed and desperate enough to take a test about every six minutes for absolutely no reason, just in case we’ve gotten pregnant somehow since the last test, or just in case the last twenty-four tests were wrong. For a while, taking a pregnancy test was about as routine as brushing my teeth.

I found that each time a test was negative, it stopped the dreaming and hoping for a while. Taking the tests was a way of puncturing the balloons of hope, because if I didn’t, they would lift and lift without any evidence, and their falling back down every month was too painful. The hoping was breaking my heart.