Ups and Downs

It seems it's been awhile since I've written on the blog, so it's time for an update. Things are going alright...the days are slowly getting a little easier now that I've had a month to process it all. Whereas the norm used to be getting excited when I thought about our baby, the norm has become getting sad. Which is good and bad. It's bad because, of course no one enjoys being sad, and I wish with all my heart that things hadn't turned out this way. But it's good because it's not like a new stab of pain every time I think about what happened. I'm getting used to the sad, unsettled feelings. A down side to this, though, is that the feelings of disbelief have been replaced with feelings of utter helplessness. I have absolutely no control over this situation. I see other families with babies, and I just want to cry out at God, "Why not me? Why have you chosen this path, this life for us?"

I've been able to go on with life pretty normally - work, traveling, church, more work. I'm happy most of the time, which is good. I'm able to laugh, to enjoy the little things. There are definitely still the hard moments though, the moments that are impossible to bear, moments of despair. It is still sometimes so gut-wrenching that I don't know if I can handle it. When I was pregnant, it just seemed too good to be true, I almost couldn't believe it. It turns out that it was.

BUT we got some good news from a doctor this week. It will still be several months before we will be able to start trying to get pregnant again, but there is definitely hope at the end of the tunnel. In a few months, my body will hopefully be completely normal! The prospect of that gives me so much joy.

Life has been a crazy series of ups and downs lately. After we lost the baby, I had a month of numbness...just going through each day on auto-pilot. I would work, come home, shoot a wedding on the weekend, have my Sunday off, and go back to work on Monday. Nothing different, nothing challenging, nothing happy. Then we had my brother's wedding this past weekend, which was so amazing. I wrote about it on my photo blog if you'd like to know more. We were all so happy for Michael and Sara. Then this week rolled around, and I've been having to put in 10 and 12 hour days just to keep my head afloat with the workload I have at the studio. And while I love shooting weddings, I'm a little bummed that we have a wedding this weekend and don't get to take the holiday off. But then come Sunday, another good thing rolls around - Adam and I are headed to Yellowstone for a week of traveling and relaxing, which is extremely necessary right now. After we get back from our trip, we will have to deal with another series of doctor's appointments that may drag on for a few months. But at the end of that, we should hopefully be able to have a normal pregnancy. My head and heart feel tugged back and forth, and I feel like I just want an uneventful life for awhile!

My sister-in-law, Jessica, recently had a quote from author Chuck Swindoll on her blog:

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable.

The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our Attitudes.

I strive each day to stay positive, to put my trust fully the Lord and his plans. I tend to fail more days than not, but reading this quote was a good reminder of why I need to try to not let this event define my life and my outlook on life. How I deal with this is up to me. What good would come of being sad and depressed? What amazing things could happen by letting this experience make me more dependent on Him?