A Whole New Definition to Black Friday

My sister and I have done the Black Friday thing for years. It started about 10 years ago, I was driving to work one November morning and the radio personalities were talking about how the mall was going to open at 12:01am on Black Friday. I wanted in. My mom was never a big Black Friday person, she is more the kind of person that starts her Christmas shopping in October and is pretty much done by Thanksgiving. My sister and I decided to start our own tradition. Over the years, my sister has become more like my mom and starts Christmas shopping early. I like to be a little more traditional and do not start my Christmas shopping until Black Friday.

This year was different. We stopped going to the mall years ago, but we still liked to head out of the house by 5am and would get home around 9am with Christmas shopping more or less completed for the year. This year, I had my blood pregnancy test at 8:15 in the morning. My mom and my sister decided to change things up a bit, and have a late Black Friday. The logic was to keep me busy with retail therapy while waiting for the doctor called back. We got to the mall around 10am, and about 30 seconds after I stepped out of the car, my phone rang. 

The test was negative, we lost both embryos. 

Shopping to keep my mind off of things quickly turned into full scaled retail therapy. I focused on Christmas as a temporary escape from my heart breaking. I choked back the tears, called Tom, because he needed to know, and went about my day. I managed to keep myself occupied with family visits, shopping, and dinner out until almost midnight, by that point, Tom and I had the "what do we do now" conversation. We went to bed, and I thought all was going to be okay. 

Everything was okay, until about 5am Saturday morning when everything hit. I cried. I cried for my overwhelming sense of failure, for the loss of our embryos, for the loss of the idea of having an entire family born the same month. As much as I tried to remain cautious, I was still optimistic. I wanted this IVF cycle to work, we have been trying so hard. I cried because of the numbers of children that are neglected and seemingly unwanted in the world, but we cannot have a baby of our own. It was hard. Crazy hard. 

Where do we go from here? Tom and I are going to relax and enjoy the holidays. My mother-in-law is planning to drive to Maine from Kansas City, and we are going to host Christmas dinner for both families. I am going to spoil Tom with presents, smile, and enjoy the season. In January, we are going to start the entire process over again, with the IVF cycle occurring sometime in February. We are working to reduce/ remove all of the big stressers in our life. We are also going to be much more private about it, because I think I jinxed  myself by blogging about it. For whatever reason, this time was not our time. We will become parents, no matter what it takes.