can't think outside the box

Wanna see the pee stick today?  it was quite exciting, after the fear of last night, to see this line here, which to me looks like the brightest line on a pee stick in the whole wide universe:

To compare with the one from two days ago, it is at least doubly dark, here is that one as well, just because I seem to be obsessed with these details lately:

I should be reassured by these lines, and I am, enough to say that today I will restrain myself to the morning stick only.  That is not to say that tomorrow bright and early I will be able to urinate without the assistance of one of these trusty little gadgets, since I honestly think that if I go for more than 24 hours without marking my territory on one I will convince myself that the pregnancy has died.

Along the same lines, a dear friend of mine, who is very pregnant, offered to give me a website for buying  darling little cribs after hearing of my news (by now, everybody in my community knows that I am pregnant, and that is fine with me, as news travel fast around here anyway) and I, for a long while, could not shake the feeling that she must be talking to the wrong person.  What do cribs have to do with being pregnant?  I ruminated the question in my head the whole day, and I still cannot honestly say to myself that I actually believe, even a little, that at the end of this pregnancy I will have a live baby that will require a crib.

I love being pregnant so far, and thinking of the life developing inside me at breakneck speed, doubling in size every day in extremely organized fashion.  I read avidly embryonic developmental websites, and can describe all three layers of the primitive embryo, plus what happens next (which is not the most exciting post material, so I will not go into details of my newly found hobby).  I can see myself growing a little body inside me, and carrying it happily to about mid-pregnancy, around 20-24 weeks or so.  I know that much is possible.  And I am fine with that much only.  But I cannot, for the life of me, think outside that box.  I would rather feel comfortable shopping online for a little urn than for a crib.

I know that I am shooting for the stars, and somewhere inside me I am completely closed off to the possibility of a live baby.  It is a dreadful thing to say, and an even more dreadful thing to live, but it is my blog and I choose to be honest.  I also need to let everyone here know that thinking this way will not cause a bad outcome.  This particular truth has taken me a whole year to grasp, and please don't tempt me to regress and go back to thinking that awful things happen to me because I believe that they will.  It is a circular argument, and the more accurate version would be to say that I believe awful things will happen to me because they do.  Or at least they did.  Perhaps, if the universe gives me a break at some point, I will believe differently, but I think that we can only go as far as our experiences allow us to go.

If you have never experienced pregnancy but have seen the majority of other women deliver babies after being pregnant, then that is the extent of your ability to imagine things, and that is what you will consider the norm for yourself.  I used to think that way with my first pregnancy.  If you have already given birth to a live baby, then you already know that you can, case closed.  If all you have ever been able to do is to produce a stillborn and a couple of miscarriages, then you know with every fiber of your being that ALL you have been able to do is to produce a stillborn and a couple of miscarriages.  There isn't a minute of the day where you think anything else.

I do think as time goes on my mind might allow me to imagine a baby at the end of this, but for now, each time I try, I get nothing.  Nothing.  I can imagine a fetus, but not a baby.  I guess perhaps I have to give it time.