Plans on Fire

I knew I wanted to be a mom when I was 24. Two things happened for me at that age – my niece Olivia was born and I met Steve. Olivia was my first niece or nephew, the first baby in my family of three older siblings. The first time I held her, I told my sister that I had never felt so much love for another living being in my life. She looked at me, only a few weeks postpartum and said, if she was your baby, you’d love her even more. That amount of love seemed unfathomable at the time, but it got me curious.

Steve and I were together for five years before we got married. There was a spark from our first date, but the deeper, stronger love that has been the foundation holding us up until now, was built in those first five years. I was in a rush to do everything in our relationship – first kiss, first vacation as a couple, move in together, get engaged, get married. In true Steve fashion, he took his time. I’m so grateful for the time now because it tested us. It presented circumstances, big and small, that pushed us apart and made us ask if we were the best mach. It was easy to walk away then, but we stayed.

We started trying to have a baby from the moment we got married in 2014. Steve and I are both the youngest of four kids with two handfuls of nieces and nephews on both sides. Since my Mom had four kids, with one ovary nonetheless, I was pretty certain that I would sneeze and get pregnant. One year into the “trying” and we’d find ourselves without a baby and with a lot of follow up appointments with fertility doctors instead. Turns out I had PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, aka tiny cysts on both of my ovaries that prevented me from ovulating, a pretty key component to having a baby. I started taking medication to force ovulation which made me feel not like myself. We tried two rounds of medication with no luck. We were advised to go to a fertility specialist to talk about IUI or IVF and determine what might be best for our case. I started going to an acupuncturist 2-3 times a week to assist in regulating my menstrual cycle, or starting one in the first place, and around the same time started practicing something called the 5 Tibetan Rites as taught to me by my yoga teacher, Mary Jarvis, every day. The Rites are claimed to be good for the body’s endocrine system which is also key to fertility. I went to an open house of sorts at a fertility specialist with my friend who was also in the fertility rabbit hole with her partner. We signed in at the desk and found two open seats amongst the other couples in the room. We listened to the generic options, collected the pamphlets, and left.

I was 29 years old, Steve 34. We were one year into our marriage, had moved, gotten a dog, and I was in the middle of transitioning from a job in digital advertising to becoming a full time yoga teacher with a hankering to start my own business. We talked about IUI and IVF, we talked about adoption, we talked about not having kids at all and we put a pause on the conversation about expanding our family and shifted our focus on what we wanted for our lives as a newly married couple with no kids in sight.  

With the unwelcomed plot twist in our family plans, I started dreaming up something different. I set my sights on moving out of Northern Virginia and back to Richmond where commutes were less than an hour and I had two siblings and four nieces within 15 minutes of one another. I couldn’t quite map out teaching yoga full time the way I had envisioned it in Richmond so I wrote a business plan to open my own hot power yoga studio and pitched it to Steve. Within 4 months I had signed a commercial lease, personally guaranteed my life savings, and was moving to Richmond, leaving my husband in Northern Virginia.

 When we got married, I hadn’t planned to move into a separate apartment, in a separate city within the first two years of our marriage. My plans had involved us selling our one bedroom condo, trading up for a two bedroom apartment with green space and plenty of extra room for a baby. I was learning that plans were meant to be broken and sometimes just flat out lit on fire.

On January 6, 2016 I opened my first brick and mortar yoga studio in Richmond. Steve and I were two months into our long distance marriage that involved him driving to Richmond on the weekends and back to Arlington on Sunday evening or Monday morning. On January 14, I picked up a pregnancy test from the grocery store. I took the test while I was talking to my friend Lindsey on the phone. I had taken what felt like hundreds of pregnancy tests at that point and wasn’t expecting the results to be any different so went on with my business of the day. I peed on the stick, put it on the ledge of the bathroom sink and walked out of the bathroom, still on the phone. I walked back in and saw a faint second line, laughed at myself and told Lindsey I was seeing phantom positive lines on my pregnancy test AGAIN, hung up the phone, and walked out of the bathroom.

I stood in the kitchen. I looked at Maple and then thought about that test. I went back into the bathroom and picked it out of the trash. Was it a phantom line or a real line? I took a picture and sent it to Lindsey. She saw it too. I leashed up Maple and walked over to the park. I called Steve who was scheduled to come down to Richmond the next day. When I told him about the pregnancy test, he responded, “well it’s not mine, we don’t even live together.” Steve’s preferred way to respond to big, heavy, joyful, or sad news is with a joke. In that moment, he also had his own fair share of feeling false excitement over phantom lines on pregnancy tests. The next day when we he got to Richmond, I took another test and the line was darker, clearer, no denying it positive, to which he responded, “shit, we have to move again.”

We had thought Steve would stay in Northern Virginia for at least a year with a job he loved and one that provided us with a guaranteed pay check. After five months of living apart, Steve found a new job, moved to Richmond, and we started looking for new places to live. In early September we moved into our first house together just weeks before Holt was born. In one year we had moved four times, from one shared apartment, to a separate one plus our friends’ basement, back to a shared apartment and a storage unit, and finally into our home. 

Love is expansive energy. It is the universal connector to our truth, the rest of the world, here and beyond. When I met Olivia for the first time my heart expanded, it was a new kind of selfless love that somehow connected me to my deeper self and a purpose as a mother that I will continuously realize for the rest of my life. The love that grew and grows for Steve is the same love that we build and rebuild our life on, the life without kids and the one with, the life we planned and the one we did not.