Giving Up Ghosts

My due date was this week.

I think I expected to be sadder than I was, more depressed- which is not to say I wasn't sad or depressed, but, to quote myself, "You can tell I'm sad because I'm so angry."

(Yes, anger.  My default emotion.)

The entire experience was complicated by the fact that I really, truly believed I'd gotten pregnant this month.  I'd been nauseated for almost two weeks, my period was late by almost a full week... The writer in me couldn't help but rapturize to herself,

Oh perfection, oh synchronicity!  To discover I'm harboring new life just when the-baby-that-wasn't would have arrived.

Except not, of course.

So much for my perfect narrative.

So that's it, then.  My ghost pregnancy has run it's course, and I will no longer be plagued by "I should be this many months pregnant by now!" realizations stabbing me in the uterus with grief.  My little ghost embryo grew into a ghost fetus, and got itself ghost born back into the ghostly aether.  Perhaps now "my baby would be this old," thoughts will start showing up instead, but somehow I doubt that.  I never knew a baby- just a pregnancy, which should have lasted nine months.  Those months have fallen off the calendar, and I'm both sad and glad to see the last of them.

The experience of being so sure this month (coupled, obviously, with being so wrong) has brought me to a place I wasn't sure I'd ever get to.  Nathan and I have been trying to breed for four years now, with only the one failed-success.  We've talked, in the past, about how far down the Infertility Treatment Rabbit Hole we'd be willing to go, but I'd never actually felt like the time was right to pursue anything beyond clinging to the belief that "It will happen if it's meant to."

Well today I got to that place.  I don't know what, exactly, makes this time different, but it is.  So there's another ghost I'm letting go of- the idea that I could have a baby naturally.

I'm not really sure yet how I feel about that- writing this is part of how I'm processing things.  Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow, maybe I won't.  But either way, I think I'm done with ghosts for a while.