“More Room for Baby,” an episode of Designed to Sell on HGTV—where experts come in and help homeowners modify their homes for best resale value—has been suggested to me by TiVo.  Well of course it has.  Baby everything is everywhere now–now that it’s top of mind.  Now that it’s not working. 

When I first became pregnant it was the same way.  There seemed to be more baby stores, more gingham, and more blue. Tiny things to tie.  More playgrounds and fathers. Strollers. Pregnant was everywhere.  And now it’s still the same, more everywhere, even though we have less.  I’m on cycle day eighteen, and I’m bleeding.  I shouldn’t be. 

So I spent the night googling “brownish blood spotting.”  I’m not kidding.  An entire night.   I rounded the evening off by IMing a stranger who advised me to stress less and take my temperature more.  “But I’m spotting.  I think.”  I don’t even know what that means, really.  Because when it first happens, without the advantage of seeing what will happen the next day, it could be a full on period.  You’re left up in the air guessing if spot will run.  “The pink wipe,” she called it.  “There’s nothing more disappointing.”  “Maybe,” she continued, “you’re gearing up for the big one.”  I knew what she meant before she went on with, “you know what I mean.”  She meant the one “that’s like meat.”  It was the most awful I ever felt.  Crampy and heavy, and unsuspecting.  It was everywhere.  I sobbed when my last “big one” happened.  It wasn’t a miscarriage, just my first period afterward.  I’ll always remember that.  Meat.  It reminded me I was an animal.

“Well, maybe it’s implantation spotting,” she said.  And then I backgrounded her and began to google a new term.  I had hope.  Maybe it really was—no.  It wasn’t.  Because that’s thinner, it’s a trace, not a mark.  I’m gearing up, maybe.  Or not ovulating at all.  It means, with all the “maybe”s and “or”s, I’ve got a call into my doctor in the AM.  Then I’ll be told to wait it out and see what happens.

Now that it’s AM, that’s exactly what I was told by my doctor.  To see what happens in a day or so.  Today things are brighter, not my attitude; everything else.  It’s a real period now.  Is it normal to have a seventeen day cycle?  What the hell does it mean?  I have months of a seventeen-day cycle followed by months of a twenty-seven day cycle followed by more seventeen-day cycles.  I’m as irregular as those Entenmann’s coffee cakes they sold in the outlet store by my house growing up.  Maybe it was another miscarriage.  Maybe I’m not ovulating, despite what those ovulation sticks said.  I’m tired of maybes.  I want answers and babies. 

I tried to find a happy post in my bag of tricks.  Sometimes I cull entries for a week, dictating the words from my handwritten journal.  I looked for something happy because I’m tired of people telling me all I do is bitch or whine or cry.  That has never felt true, but it feels true today because the only times I write are when I am cranky, angry, melancholy, or anything else ending in a "y" besides "happy."  That’s what I do.  When I’m happy, I’m not inside by a computer.  I’m writing something else.  And if you feel the need to bitch and worry this blog will become a mommy blog or fertility blog, do it elsewhere please.  I’m not in the mood to remind you I’ve got more going on than a menstrual cycle.