Every once in a while I get a little nostalgic and share a more lengthy portion of my story. I’ve finally pulled together my thoughts (read slept enough) to share about what may very well be my last run at motherhood. You can catch up on this story and others by clicking HERE.

I wanted so desperately to announce a pregnancy at Christmas.

That’s what was supposed to happen the first time we got pregnant. The time I called my mom, still four hours away, sobbing into the phone instead. That pregnancy had ended just days before what would become the last Christmas my family celebrated together, with my grandparents and my siblings and everything as it always was.

Except for me that year it wasn’t.

Now seven years later I was hoping for another chance.

It felt like a very redemptive way to punctuate a final addition to our family. Our journey to becoming a family began at Christmas and poetically it could end where it began. Plus with a baby born on my parents anniversary, and one the day before ours, I felt it only fair Mike’s parents have a September baby all their own.

I convinced myself the signs were there.

That this month could really be the month. I bought the pregnancy tests and dared to consider what Pinterest-y thing we could do to tell our parents baby number 3 was on the way. I told myself they were all false negatives because surely it was still just too early to tell. I tried to exude the confidence I had when I-knew-that-I-knew-that-I-knew I was pregnant with both Elijah and Noah.

But I was wrong.

And this time it really hurt.

It’s true that I’d been on the fence for a while about having another baby. We had just started sleeping through the night and leaving the house without a diaper bag, and I knew that another baby would do some serious cramping to our lifestyle. But I also knew we were incomplete. That the longer I waited, the closer we’d resemble two separate families rather than one.

A few months of trying with no success brought with it a certain peace, knowing I was less in control of this thing than I thought. But hope started growing in that soil, and my boys kept getting older, and I started wondering how I’d manage if we never had that third baby after all.

I didn’t like how that thought played out.

I texted two of my best friends – the only two people who knew the back-and-forth what-ifs of my heart – and asked them to pray for me. Christmas was the following week and this tiny grief was crowding the tender shoot of hope in my heart. Even though it wasn’t the same, there were still too many parallels to that empty Christmas so long ago, and I didn’t particularly want to relive it this year again.

Before I left the restroom, I dried my eyes and laid that months hope to rest. I reminded myself I had the boys, and Mike, and another month of possibility.

At least I hadn’t been late.

That was not a roller coaster I was interested in riding again.

To be continued with another installment of . . .

Prologue | For the Love of Christmas [Three Times a Mom]