Thoughts on Christmas

I've never been one to take fortune cookies seriously, but there's one fortune that I've saved for a loooooong time (maybe since I lived in Nashville). I've moved several times and still managed to hold onto this little strip of paper, now yellowed and brittle. Its current home is on our refrigerator, and now every time look at it I smile a little smile of agreement. It reads "Your dearest wish will come true."

All I've always wanted is to be a wife and a mom. I know that's not always a popular ambition in these times when women can be whatever they want, and there have been plenty of moments when I have worried that people would think less of me because I don't have this driving need to have a successful career. I like having the skills that allow me to support myself, and I'm certainly glad that I have my master's degree, but ultimately my job has just felt like a stepping stone to what I feel is my ultimate purpose, and that is motherhood. When Stewart and I got married, we knew it would be several years before we would start a family, and I was ok with that. In fact, I was glad that we would have a few years to be married before bringing kids into our family. Well, that feeling lasted about a year. We hit our one year anniversary, and all of the sudden the desire to have a baby hit me like a ton of bricks. And it didn't go away. The next two years were really hard...I honestly let this desire consume me. I would think about it all day, every day. I would cry on my way to work (and many other times) because it seemed like so long to wait until we'd be able to have a baby. Of course the unknown of how long it would take to actually get pregnant once we started trying made it even harder. Thankfully I have a wonderful husband who understood and never made me feel bad about what I was going through. But those last couple Christmases were always tough for some reason. All I could think about was how long it would be before we would be celebrating Christmas with our children. I remember last year that I hoped and prayed that I would be pregnant by this Christmas. I imagined how different I would feel, how my sadness would be replaced with anticipation. I imagined being surrounded with family and talking about what the following Christmas would be like, once we had a new member of the family. And the whole time I was thinking and hoping for these things, I pictured myself being maybe three or four months pregnant. I had no idea that we would be only weeks away from meeting our son.

My dearest wish is about to come true.

Merry Christmas!