The Traffic Game

We have this game we play. Whenever we are in the car and the traffic is looking really good and we are pleased by our progress, we never say, "Oh, wow, look at how well the traffic is moving, we're making great time." We say instead, "I'm sure that any minute now the traffic will slow down considerably and the trip will take longer than we planned." This is because of a theory that we hold that if you talk about how well something is going and presume to suggest that the future will continue to be good, something bad happens because you tempted the gods. This game doesn't always work, but a lot of the time it does and we can't explain it so we just go with it.

When we started talking seriously about having a baby, we realized that this was another situation where we needed to play the game. We couldn't say, "Of course, Katie will get pregnant really quickly so we need to plan for an October baby." That would just be asking for God to notice us and make it take forever for us to conceive. It's not that I believe in a vengeful God, I'm just really careful about jinxing my life. So we say instead, "We should buy 8 vials of sperm because we will certainly need all of them. We should stock up on OPK's because we are in this for the long haul."

That being said, there is this little bit of me that just keeps thinking about how I will be pregnant in just a few months of trying; about how I will be on maternity leave this time next year. (I will leave for another day the description of how good the benefits are at my job. Seriously, Em jokes that I work in Sweden.) And even as the little, quiet bit of me fantasizes about how big I will get over the next year, another part of me is realistically planning to be in this for the long haul. Because Emily and I have not found life to be easy and without trial. Death and serious illness seem to stalk us. So I try to nurture the little bit of myself that is thinking that this baby thing is going to be easy and straightforward, because deep down, I am so convinced that this is going to be one more thing that is really hard.