Three words

For over three months, maybe more, I have longed to say three words - I am pregnant. But I wasn't. So I couldn't. I didn't imagine I'd ever get to say those words again.

For those months, which stretched ahead to me in what seemed like perpetual succession, I just had to roll my tongue around those words as if I were learning all over again how to write, tracing their outline with my pencil, afraid to press too hard lest the mark they make not quite look the way I'd intended it to; in case I didn't recognise what had come from my own mouth, or hand. I'd practice them silently so I'd be ready, just in case. I thought it wasn't likely, but I maintained a fading glimmer of hope. That tiny sliver of hope made it OK for me to wake up in the morning. It won't always be like this, was my mantra. It might not always be like this.

Now I am pregnant. I simply am. And yet those words are no easier to say. When I say them out loud or see them on the page they mock me. They embarrass me. They make me cower with guilt. And yet when I saw that test, two glorious pink lines, I could have collapsed with relief, with joy, with hope, and happiness. The feelings are all mixed up. But so are our lives. Nothing is where it should be, nothing is as we expected. So I accept this confusion without judgement. I allow the fear and the suffering. I embrace the warmth and the light. How I embrace the warmth and the light.

I have known about this pregnancy for two days. They have been the lightest two days in my living history. The complications are there - the connections that will be made with grief and uncertainty and stone cold fear. But they're a vague undercurrent right now. They are something separate. Let me have these days, I say silently to myself. Let me just have these few, precious, happy days, before this news becomes linked with what came before.

I am so happy. We are so happy. We are delighted, and grinning and hopeful.

But we are not healed. Please don't think that we are healed.

We have been given a second chance. But it is just a chance. These cells multiplying inside me will do their job without me, despite me. But they offer no guarantees. There are no guarantees. But there's a chance. And if a chance is all we've got, then a chance is what we'll take.

We won't talk of babies. Not now. Not yet. It is not our place to get carried away. That kind of enthusiasm is for the lucky majority. We are not them. But we are lucky still. We may be less lucky than most, but we are luckier than many others, for whom months of trying to conceive does not end in the result they long to see. I think of them, most of all, now.

We have love, and we have hope. We know those two things will get us through any challenges the coming months bring. It is not going to easy. It is going to be very, very hard. We will take this one day at a time. We will take the photos we did not take before. We will celebrate even the smallest milestones. We will try to experience this moment by perfect moment. And we'll pray to who ever will listen that those moments will last.