The egg's out of the gate

I got a temp rise this morning that looks pretty promising as a post-O temp shift. That makes yesterday my ovulation day, technically, although in terms of CM and overall physical feelings, it felt like my most fertile time had passed. I had only scant, barely noticeable watery CM that moved to creamy by evening. If I hadn't been temping I would have said my egg had already hatched. So as I visualize it, Mr. I's boys were right there waiting when the egg left the gate and got to it immediately, switching off all my body's "do me" signals early in the morning (I do temp at only 5:30am).

Last cycle I had fairly low expectations, and little hope during my entire two week wait. In that vague, purely intuitive sense I just didn't feel like we'd done it. Sure, our timing was just fine. But I didn't feel anything. Of course rationally I know that means little, but that's how I felt, and I was unsurprised to get a BFN on my tests. Also, curiously, my baby dreams were on a pretty low simmer... I was feeling relatively unattached to the idea of getting pregnant again - at times, I confess, even downright ambivalent.

This cycle is shaping up to be different. I feel my hopes and my baby rabies ramping up already. The memories of being pregnant, and fantasies of having a big belly and having a child of our own, are growing more vivid than they have in months. Dreams of my breasts swelling, of little movements inside me, of laying my baby down in a bassinet, seem almost painfully real in little flashes of longing that come to me from time to time.

Having my mother and 13 year old sister in town for a week brought a lot of emotions and hopes and dreams bubbling up for me and for Mr. Ibis as well. Although she is his sister-in-law, he feels very paternal toward Sis. In all his interactions with her, he said, he felt he could see himself as a dad and yearned to have that relationship with his own child. I think that part of this is she currently marks an age when he shared a lot of special time with his father, the 8th anniversary of whose death is in about a week. In the past week Mr. Ibis has talked a lot about my sister, about being a dad someday, and about his own dad. When Mr. Ibis was 13, his parents were divorced and his father made sure to spend a lot of quality one on one time with Mr. I, which are memories he now holds very dear. I can see how much he wants to be that - be a dad - to his own offspring. Shortly after we dropped Mom & Sis at the airport, he said apropos of nothing, "I really hope we made a baby this time."

Oof. Of course I am glad (beyond glad!) that he feels that way, but it is almost like a sucker punch to hear how much he wants it too....

As for me, as I've mentioned I have had a pretty complex relationship with my mom. For some time the disaster that was my parents' marriage made me wonder if I were capable of a happy one (turns out I am), and then for a while my issues with my mom made me wonder if I were capable of being a good mother. The odd thing about this visit was how... normal and non-stressful it was to be around my mom. I think there was a little bit of an adjustment at first, because I had worked myself up for something more complicate and uncomfortable. But then as it turned out we had a nice time. We had pleasant conversation. We are not, and never will be, as close as she and my sister are. But we are certainly worlds better than we used to be. It made me feel like maybe I - with all that I was going through personally, developmentally, emotionally, psychologically - contributed just as much to the "bad" years as she did. And now that I'm basically just a happy, well-adjusted person our relationship has settled into something pretty benign and even... easy.

It's a bit of a winding road, or perhaps a fuzzy blur, from that to how I feel about having a child at the moment. All I know is that being around my mom again made me want to be a mom again, very badly.

Maybe part of it was looking at old pictures from my childhood with her, and hearing her talk about how each of us were as babies, and mention moments from our childhoods that she remembered. Although so much of the drama between my mom and I centered around how she seemed to "resign" as our mother for a little while, and almost disown her role as mom, now from the way she talked about it it sounded like those were the best years of her life. And I want that phase of my life to begin. I guess, though it sounds weird and hardly noble of me, her anecdotes made me envious. I can't wait for my world to be about mothering, and co-parenting with Mr. Ibis.

On top of that, in two days I've just started a finished a memoir called Baby Love by Rebecca Walker. Part memoir, part treatise on what it means for a feminist woman to become a mother, it's about her decision to have a baby and all that it meant to her in terms of her identity and her self-image. It follows her first pregnancy from the moment she finds out she's pregnant to shortly after her son's birth, and although she ostensibly feels some ambivalence and fear about pregnancy and motherhood, in the long run she finds every moment of the journey to be magical and transformative and wonderful. She urges women, they simply must experience this. I'm trying! I'm trying as hard as I can.

So today, I percolate. Either that little sperm on which all our hopes are pinned is even now busting through the walls of an egg, or that egg that we've been cheering on is already beginning to fade away. Only time will tell. My next period is due on or just after Mother's Day: how perfect, or not. I'm undecided as to when I might test. I could certainly test earlier than that, since my LP is so long and I could probably get a positive result on the Thursday or Friday before, if I'm going to at all. It would be fun to get a BFP on Mother's Day itself, but not so fun to get a BFN. Then again, if I'm not pregnant, I'm not pregnant, no matter when I test. I'll probably just wait and see how I feel that weekend.