When things start splitting at the seams and now

The whole thing’s tumbling down…

No one’s gonna love you more than I do.

“I really don’t know how much more of this I can take,” her email read, and though our circumstances are different, our feelings are not. Her words echoed the thought running through my mind as I lay on the table, screen beside me on one side and The Husband on the other, and an all-too-silent–again–doctor and his nurse, brows furrowed in concentration and exploration.

It wasn’t this hard last time. It wasn’t this hard last time, I think, and we’ve said, and the underlying implication is that it shouldn’t be this time, either. Because this time, after the better part of a year of trying, of peeing on sticks and waiting on results, we finally had a positive. And ever since, we have been on a roller coaster, moments of elation followed by moments of trepidation, cautiously optimistic, alternating between hopeful and disappointed, excited and fearful, giddy and resigned. This can’t be good for the heart, these highs and lows. When the doctor asks if there’s been any pain, I hold back the truth, the words that don’t fit the cold and sterile room because they are both melodramatic and way too real.

Only my heart.

He shows me the image, the space where, two years ago, there was a heartbeat. Today there is not. Today there is just emptiness, and we don’t know yet if that space will fill with life or if it will slowly fade away. But he’s less optimistic as time goes by, he says, and for the third week in a row we sit across from him in an office and feel hope deflate. For the third week in a row my arm is poked with a needle. For the third week in a row I will wait twenty-four hours for numbers that could dictate our future.

But do they? And how much hope have I placed in that empty space on the screen? My fear is that the answer is…all of it.

And that is the real diagnosis here.

Because the medical one, and the possibility he gives of it now, involves chromosomes and the word blighted and what amounts to a bad egg and I almost have to laugh–bitterly–at the image it invokes: Veruca Salt being plunged into darkness after her attention-grabbing solo, her demands of “wanting it now”, and though I may dress it up in various shades of ambition and humility and churchgoing and prayer, there is still–there will always be–a part of me that is that little girl, who thinks that studying hard equals getting a good grade, that working hard equals success, that praying hard equals favor, as if the methods of God’s kingdom are comparable to the ways of this broken world. As if I deserve a break because I know the Owner. When all around me, people better than I are waiting on jobs and husbands and babies, have been suffering miscarriages of hope for years, and I hear them and pray not to join their ranks. As if I can somehow earn an exemption for good behavior? I know better. Don’t I?

Though this world may operate on a level more akin to karma, I know that the kingdom of my true residence does not. But what could be scarier than a love that is so big it does not recognize my designations of good and bad, that has more invested in me than my comfort and happiness and timetables? And though, when hope is deferred or outright dies altogether, and that love feels like less rather than more, what will I do?

What do I do if this empty space never fills, but fades instead? Will I go back to running, to spin class, to my nightly glass of red as if nothing ever happened? How can I keep seeing this doctor who has delivered so much bad news? How can I keep seeing this God who has not kept the bad news from being delivered?

Will I continue to proclaim faith in pews and posts while secretly stashing away my heart in broken cisterns? Do I believe what I say I believe, or am I really just a functional atheist, claiming God as mine until things don’t go the way I so desperately hoped?

Is my hope in that sac, on that screen, in that room, or is it located in another realm entirely? With one who is good, but not safe–at least not as I define safe, all smooth edges and predictability and not a roller coaster to be seen?

And I feel them now, the holes where others have had their blood spilled too, the dreams deferred and dying, the invisible threads connecting us that I wouldn’t have known existed before now, and I know that we don’t have to talk about it–we can keep it quiet and discuss our vacation plans and church-friendly prayer requests if we want, but I also know that sometimes small talk is just self-protection and the only place that self-protection ever landed me was alone. Which is exactly what an enemy would have me believe I am, because in some ways it is only happening to me, but really? It is not. It is not only happening to me, or to you. It is happening to all of us. And though there is an ending to this chapter that leaves me pushing away TH and everyone else, that leaves me bitter and resentful, there is another ending. There is always another ending, because there is one who makes beginnings of endings.

And so, over the next twenty-four hours, I will wait. I will cry, I will hold my breath and check my underwear and feel the nerves. But also? I will press publish and I will pray more honestly than I have in awhile, and I will talk with the people who can bear my weight and whose weight I have borne, and I will fold The Kid’s laundry and pull his sheets tight so he doesn’t have to sleep on wrinkles that he would never notice but I do. I will be held by a man who doesn’t have a uterus but doesn’t have to be shunned for that because we are one person now, not two. I will open a door and a nearly-two-year-old will turn and see me and light up and run on legs that took their time. I will remember the two times in as many days when this happened: my back was turned to him and my heart was heavy, and I felt TK grab onto my legs and bury his face in them and wait a moment while I bent down and hugged him before he ran off. Like he knew. Or like Someone did.

I will choose to believe that there is no empty space that will not be filled, that there is nothing sad that will not come untrue. Because our preacher said it yesterday, and it was like my heart was hearing it for the first time: Do you really believe he loves you? And I realized that there are places in which I still don’t believe it. Empty spaces waiting to come to life.