Life: It Goes On

I truly meant to write a post right at the beginning of the year, a themed post to go along with making resolutions for the coming year; a post to both reflect on the past year and embrace the coming year.  Best laid plans and intentions and all that.  Now its almost two weeks into the year and I have trouble remembering the feelings and thoughts I wanted to convey in that grand thought about post.

I know I wanted to talk about resolutions, because I had a specific one in mind - cooking more, eating out less.  This of course ties into two very big bugaboos of mine - not becoming complacent with weight loss (I've lost a 100 pounds, but I need to keep moving forward), and finally taking charge of our finances in a serious way to allow us to save money and pay down debt quicker (which would happen if we (I) didn't spend so much money eating out simply because I don't want to cook.  That was the goal, and it's had mixed results so far.  Haven't been perfect, but I've been better.

Oddly, this resolution does tie into my looking back, embracing the future theme.  One of the primary reasons or rationale behind that cooking more, eating out less, particularly from the financial side of things, was so we would be better prepared whenever we were fortunate to have a child and add to our family.  I wrote in my last post about changing perspectives, and how I often forget to focus on what I have as opposed to what I don't have.  Frankly, that has been difficult for the past year.

As I wrote here, about 15 months ago, after several years of trying, Jackie got pregnant, and then had a miscarriage shortly thereafter.  We spent all of last year learning more about the process, investigating, and investing to try and have a child of our own.  It was very easy, almost inevitable, to avoid that continual and nagging thought of how we don't have that in our life, and how much is missing because of that.  But we kept our chins up, as they say, and continued to move forward.  We invested in a specific treatment, and even though based on what we had learned that the odds were long, we had some hope at trying something new; that trying something new would yield a different result.

This last Saturday, that different result happened, as we had a positive pregnancy test.  It seemed that our hopes had finally been realized, and 2012 really was going to be a great year, and the perfect time to kick into gear all those resolutions.  As I wrote in that November 20120 post about the previous pregnancy and resultant miscarriage, life doesn't always work the way we want it.  Beginning Sunday night and into Monday, Jackie had another miscarriage.  As Jackie had stated, it never occurred to us that it could happen again.  As a result, this time really feels much, much worse.

I wrote that last time that we were doing our best to keep up hope.  That has become extremely difficult this week.  And we've discussed maintaining hope, but also probably having to redefine our expectations of how we will start a family of our own.

I'm really not sure where things go from here for us, its still too close in time for us to think and feel clearly about where we go.  A reality is that we have tried for almost five years to have a child of our own, and have only two miscarriages as a result.  Another reality is that Jackie and I are still very, very fortunate to have each other.  Which, in dealing with another loss, is a good thing, as life isn't going to stop because we have difficulty keeping up.

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost