Why Pregnancy Apps, Trackers, and Calendars Suck

I haven’t written in over a week because I’ve been emotionally paralyzed. I was busy researching some great posts on ‘eating for fertility’ and even started compiling my essential ‘trying to conceive booklist for body and soul’ — these posts are totally coming, I swear.

I felt organized and on top of my emotions. I had reached a comfortable, complacent place in my mind where even though I was taking a break from ‘trying’ I could be a resource for women around me, and even offer some words of comfort to my future—hopefully pregnant—self.

And then it all went to crap.

With classic Type A gusto, I was plotting out my life in MS Outlook and there it was. My would-have-been due date.

I’ve posted about this feeling of being succor-punched by the past before. So why does it always feel like the first time?

I thought that I’d deleted all the pregnancy tracker apps off my phone and iPad. I thought I’d obliterated all the prenatal appointments and markers from my calendars and to-do lists.

Nope.

Seeing it is enough to make me mentally jump-cut to a path where life closed a door: there was no miscarriage, no fertility treatments. I am a mom for the 2^nd time; my little house a pleasant mess of freshly washed layette; my life swaying to the primal rhythm of sleep-feed-love.

I am back to ‘my old self.’ The self that was a result of the path I was supposed to be on just a short while back. Hubs and I look at each other with glowing eyes and knowing smiles. I breathe in the moment.

And then it’s gone.

Hubs and I avert our eyes with knowing aches and the kind of hollowness that can come between partners when dreams are challenged. I am not my ‘old self’ and I never will be again. There is a new path ahead and we have no idea what it is. It’s not sad, it’s just different.

I’m thrilled, scared, hopeful, introspective, and daring myself to live out-loud.

We never stop growing. We never stop learning who we are, and even in the face of loss we can eventually find happiness.

The other night, I was at Danielle Laporte’s book launch for The Fire Starter Sessions, and her words to the crowd stayed with me as I closed down the program and shut off my laptop.

“Life wants you to win...your soul is saying 'Pick me!'”

Just breathe.