Suspicious.

Dear Baby -

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this whole blogging gig. Your Dad and I are fairly private people, so I've gone pretty far out of my way to make this blog anonymous. There are several reasons for this, with the most obvious being that no one knows about my miscarriage and I didn't think a blog was the best way to announce it. In fact, I'm not sure that I'll ever tell the majority of our family and friends. At least not for a long time. I'll probably tell your future-Gammy (still trying out grandmother names - I like this one quite a bit, but I suppose it's ultimately up to Gammy), and maybe one or two of your aunts, but I doubt it will be a family-wide announcement kind of thing. But back to privacy.

There was a guy in the town where I went to college who had a song up on the Internet that was titled with my whole name. I was really uncomfortable with that and lobbied pretty hard to have him take it down. It took a fairly long string of emails and finally some scary lawyer-speak before he complied, but it was just really creepy to me to have a song out there with my full name by some guy I didn't know in a town I use to live in. Especially considering that as far as Google and I can tell, I'm the only person on Earth with that name. Creepy.

There are a lot of people who write blogs and give out full names, cities and all sorts of additional personal information, including photos. I respect the people that do that, but it just seems too... exposed, to me. So I've opted for the other extreme of anonymity. It might be because I spent way too long in an abusive relationship and still occasionally have nightmares about him tracking me down. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. If I ever write a book, I guess anonymity will be out the window, but for now, we'll just be nameless and faceless.

The other thing about writing this anonymously is that it is incredibly liberating. There's something just, well, cathartic about putting all my crazy down on (electronic) paper and letting the world see it. I'm pretty sure my experiences aren't unique, but as we become (as a society) increasingly disconnected from one another, it's comforting to put all my thoughts and fears out there. I don't know if anyone has or will ever read any of this, but knowing it's out there for posterity is somehow freeing.

It also gives me a record to look back on later. So if I say something prophetic, I can go back and confirm that I actually wrote it out loud first. Let me give you two examples. The first is a shoulda-woulda-coulda-but-didn't example:

A few months ago, your future Unca B and I were talking about the NFL draft. (Your Dad doesn't care for sports all that much, but lemme tell ya, kid. Your Unca B and I are going to do our damnedest to turn you into a football fan. College, though. Not pro.) One of our favorite players was involved in a bit of a controversy surrounding whether or not he would be drafted and where in the draft he would be taken. Your Unca B and I both agreed that we would love for him to go to Minnesota. You see, our favorite player was (is) Tim Tebow, and since his favorite running back target in college, Percy Harvin, was already at Minnesota, and Minnesota was going to need a quarterback soon (because they currently have Brett "Imma retire any day now for real" Favre), we felt like Minnesota would be a perfect, perfect fit for ol' Timmy. No one in the sportswriting community even discussed this as a possibility until a few weeks ago. As the draft neared, suddenly everyone was saying what we had been saying for months! And I thought, "Shman! I should have written an op-ed piece for a magazine or newspaper or something! Now everyone else is saying what I already said!" It frustrating to watch other people capitalize on your idea, kid. Ultimately, it's not that big of a deal to me in this particular instance because 1) I am not a professional writer, nor do I have the enormous amount of research and knowledge invested into the sports field that they do, and 2) Tebow went to the Denver Broncos last night as the 25th overall pick in the first round. Yes, Baby, I totally agree. It's completely mystifying why Denver would want to be three deep in quarterbacks since they already have two pretty good ones on the team. So now, for the record, I'm writing down my prediction. Denver picked up Tebow earlier in the draft than he technically should have gone because they struck a deal with another team (... saaaay, Minnesota?) to trade him later since he would have been drafted by someone else before said team could have a crack at him. Maybe it's crazy, but that's my prediction and I'm writing it down.

I've digressed pretty far at this point, but I'm coming to prediction number two directly.

Example two relates (possibly) to you. Possibly. The thing is, for a few days now, I've been feeling off. Really, really tired. Sore nipples. Super painful sore, in fact, if you (don't) want to know the ugly details. Sorry for the TMI, kid, but these are all very early pregnancy signs according to doctors, mayoclinic.com and every woman who has ever been pregnant. So I am (not so) secretly hoping that I'm pregnant again. The only problem is that it's extremely early. Extremely. And all of the websites that discuss early pregnancy symptoms are a more than a little vague on the timeline for these symptoms. The closest I could come to a timeline talked about implantation bleeding anywhere from 3-6 days after fertilization to 10-14 days after fertilization. Mayo Clinic said 10-14 days, so I'm inclined to go with that estimate. It's quite possible, and maybe even probable, that I'm being a hypochondriac about the whole thing. That I want to be pregnant so badly that I'm manifesting symptoms for a non-existent condition. The only small bit of consolation evidence I have is that the last time I felt this way, I turned out to be pregnant. I'm trying to focus on that bit, rather than how that whole experience turned out in the end... Time will tell, kiddo, but I wanted to record it here just in case. That way, I'll know what to look out for next time.

All I can say is here's hopin', kid. We'd really love to meet you.

I love you forever.
Mama