Not Forgotten

I love a good plan. A family calendar. A daily to-do app. A running grocery list. I love a good plan so much that when I was literally bleeding to death, I told my husband we couldn’t go to the hospital because we had the Compassionate Care Pregnancy Center’s fundraiser banquet that night. This banquet only happened once a year, and we’d already RSVP’d. I simply could not miss it. It was on the calendar!

In my defense, God had given me an extraordinary peace that the ten-week-old baby in my womb would live. Also in my defense, I didn’t know my abdomen was filling with blood, causing an excruciating amount of pain. I just thought I had some really bad gas. But this too shall pass, right?

Before we really get into the details, you may want me to properly introduce myself. I picture you and me pulling our chairs close in the corner of a coffee shop like new friends about to embark on an afternoon of swapping stories and building our faith.

I was born and raised in Texas, part of America’s Bible Belt. It was the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was serving his second term as president, and I think it’s safe to say I grew up praying to God as naturally as I asked for more gravy. However, I pinpoint the moment I really surrendered my life to Jesus Christ as being in the back of an auditorium filled with hundreds of high schoolers at a nondenominational church camp in South Texas. Worship music blared so loudly no one could hear my soft prayer accompanied by real tears.

From that moment, I began to devour The Holy Bible. Words I’d heard for years now came alive as I spent hours poring over the pages of God’s redemptive story. I memorized Scripture passages, then entire books of the Bible. I loved study guides. I wanted to know every word in the original Hebrew and Greek and what exactly they meant. I was hungry for God’s Word, and I ate from it daily.

Unfortunately, a lot of head knowledge with minimal experiential knowledge can be a problem. For me, it meant my faith was easily rattled when life didn’t turn out the way I’d expected. Even more so, when God didn’t perform the way I assumed he would. The way he should according to all the Bible stories I’d read.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before the faith rattling, I’d already met my husband Howell, also a native Texan, at Angelo State University (Go Rams!). If you ask him, we met at a social event for a Christian college organization in which he was a leader—and also emcee for the night. If you ask me, well, I don’t exactly remember meeting him that night (whoops!).

We married shortly after Howell graduated college, both of us a very mature twenty-two years of age. I was one year into my master’s degree in English, making plans to apply for the PhD program at Texas Tech University in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. Howell held a freshly minted business baccalaureate and was working a tough job in sales. We made plans—big ones—for our future and started saving for a house, kids, our dreams.

We jokingly disagreed about whether we would have two kids or four. But one plan we agreed on. We wanted to have all our kids before we turned thirty. We’d be young parents, then young grandparents who could retire and travel. Doesn’t that sound like a great plan?

Because I was in grad school and most advice we’d received on marriage suggested we wait a bit to start a family, we decided three years was a good number. We had some reasoning behind this timeframe, but otherwise it was somewhat arbitrary. I remember writing our “plans” on a napkin with my sister a year or so after the wedding. By then we’d been married long enough for people to begin asking, “So when are you going to have a baby?”

The plan I wrote out was a simple one. I would finish my PhD coursework in this month. We’d get pregnant in this month. I’d take my qualifying exams in this month. We’d have a baby in this month. I’d finish my dissertation by this month. It was all mapped out over two years. Easy peasy.

Once our planned time of waiting was over, I tried not to panic too much when several months passed without a single positive pregnancy test. As a self-diagnosed plan-a-holic, I found those first months of “trying” quite stressful. Still, my mom had reassured me it sometimes takes a while. By then I was a graduate instructor recently promoted from teaching first-year English writing courses to teaching second-year technical communication courses. Oh, and working on that dissertation! Howell was about a year into an improved sales job for an international company, albeit still one with a commission as part of his salary.

My thoughts swirled at all hours. If I get pregnant now, the baby will be born this month—and we have this or that coming up. My academic conference presentation. What if I have morning sickness and can’t present? My sister’s wedding. What if I’m a pregnant bridesmaid? Pictures are forever. My brother’s wedding. What if I’m so far along I can’t travel. I would be devastated if I missed his wedding.

I wanted to have children. I did. But I also wanted to know when these blessed children were coming. Perhaps you can relate.

Just shy of the magical twelve-month number, I visited my ob-gyn for my annual exam. When I mentioned our inability to conceive thus far, she ordered some tests. First, a blood test to check my hormone levels for signs of ovulation on a particular cycle day. Then a Hysterosalpingogram (HSG) test, which is an X-ray dye test that examines the uterus and fallopian tubes to check for blocked tubes and other issues that could cause infertility.

Mostly, she told me not to worry. These things take time. When the nurse called to schedule the HSG test, she also told me not to worry. After all, Howell and I hadn’t been trying a full year yet. I was young and healthy, and it was probably all good.