Triggers

Things that trigger sadness and/or anger:

The bottle of prenatal vitamins in my medicine cabinet
Holiday movies on the tv channel guide
Christmas displays at stores
Diaper ads on tv (have you seen the new Huggies ad with the dads at nap time? Ugh.)
A crying child
A stroller parked on someone's porch
The three newborns in the waiting area of the Original Pancake House
and a million other things.

When I am getting ready to meet my mom, or friends, I anticipate hearing my younger sister is pregnant again or my friend is pregnant again. Same thing when we are getting ready to go to Husband's family's-Brat's wife might be pregnant again, or I imagine someone saying something insensitive and I plan the various ways I would respond. Basically every time I'm putting on makeup or doing my hair, I am preparing myself for battle.

I have begun planning my route through Target to avoid the baby section. Yesterday I was browsing at a local florist and suddenly found myself in the section of baby gifts, involuntarily spun around and left. Saturday I was shopping with friends and had to come up with a reason to pull away from them to avoid walking the baby section.

It is not getting easier, even as we are in our third year of TTC. Everything is a reminder that we don't have a child. Each holiday we spend time and money on other people's kids and it sucks. I'm tired of putting away money into college funds for other people's kids. We should be saving for our children. We should be excited about selecting gifts for what would be our 9-month old baby, picking out silly, adorable outfits for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Instead, the holidays remind me of our constant heartbreak, of last year when we attempted to take care of ourselves and spent the holiday away from family, which we enjoyed, but were punished for later; the stress of continuing to pretend, for everyone else's comfort, that everything is fine.

As we prepare for a few days out of town for our anniversary, I keep trying to focus on how lucky we are that we have the freedom to just leave town for a few days, something we wouldn't be able to do if we had  a baby. It's little consolation though.