.procreation.

There is a term, an acronym really, used frequently in the infertility world as well as with people who have had a pregnancy end in the death of a child.  It is TTC, or "trying to conceive."  Now before anyone gets unduly excited, we are not TTC.  In fact we are TNTC and we will be on that path for the foreseeable future. But I have been thinking about what TTC means to us in the current version of our lives.

Right after George died we made the decision that we would not start trying to have a second child until well after his due date, at the very earliest.  The reason being that if we were lucky enough to have a child in the future we were wary of being able to reconcile the fact the living child we would have would only be alive because George was not.  That conundrum occurred to me only as I was reading the memoir An Exact Figment of a Replica of my Imagination and came to the point in her story when she outlines that very aspect of her own experience.  Since then the idea has taken up residence in my mind and I don't imagine that it will vacate...ever, which means there will be no trying to get pregnant until I can reasonably justify in my mind that if George had lived it would be plausible that we would be trying to have another baby.

But that hasn't been the only issue we have had to wrestle with in deciding our time frame for our next attempt at procreation.  There is also the matter of my new job (which I don't have yet but I am hopeful that I will in the near future).  Because I am a new grad there is a certain amount of training that I will need to complete before I am profitable to any office or hospital that hires me.  I've been told that is a minimum of six months and because of that I don't want take any kind of maternity leave until I have been there for at least a year. Assuming that I am employed by November that means, and I won't bore you with the math involved, that basically the earliest I feel comfortable starting on the road to pregnancy again is in February or March of next year.  Which if everything goes right, and I am all too aware that there is no guarantee that it will, the soonest we will actually have a live baby in our arms is December 2011.  

That seems so unbearably far away yet it also feels like it is a timeframe that makes the most sense for us.  Before we start down that scary path again I need to finish gathering the pieces of my former self and make an attempt at putting them back together again.  As of now I am not sure what that person will look like and I am not convinced the person I am today would make a very good mother.  Luckily I have a husband who loves me and is willing to give me as much time as I need, even if that means waiting at least another five or six months before we start TTC.

So there it is.  A plan.  One that doesn't even necessarily mean that I have the desire to have another baby because most days I don't think that I do (unless my desire for a baby is disguised as envy, which in that case I totally want a baby).  But really I just want the baby who should be here but isn't.   

.L.