Approximately 10 years ago I decided I had the skill set and the cajones to purchase my own business. By trade I am a veterinarian. I am a good one if I do say so myself, and I was boundlessly confident that being a good veterinarian would translate into a wildly successful practice of my own.
Fast forward a few years, 9 to be exact, and what you see is my pie in the sky taking a nose dive and splatting on the pavement of failure. Closure. Bankruptcy! And to add insult to injury, I sat on a toilet, alone and in shock, at a little plastic stick with a plus sign lit up like the strip in Vegas,
The second plastic stick on the evening I might add! Because the first plus sign was obviously a fluke. I mean shit!!! No one gets pregnant at 46 and a half, especially while taking those little pills they promise you will prevent this very thing. It was a fluke, my urine was just strong today!
I remember taking out my phone, snapping a photo to the offending object and sending via the ethers to my counter part in this little dance. My words read simply….”This is not a joke!”. I hit send, and I waited.
It didn’t take long to get a response. One of seeming confusion. As if the damn picture wasn’t worth a thousand words already! So I proceeded to explain. I wasn’t sure if I needed to start at the beginning, you know, the birds and the bees or if he was sufficiently versed in that aspect. So I simply stated the obvious, again, and indicated I was going to repeat the steps in the morning (unwrap plastic stick, pee on it, wait) and I was positive the heavens would realign, and there would be the “negative” just as it should be.
He said OK, let me know. Let him know? Like I would keep this to myself? Hell yes I would let him know. And we would celebrate our little scare with a laugh and a nice glass of Malbec.
But let’s just get this straight now, God very obviously has a sense of humor. Cause the next morning, in spite of drinking several gallons of water to flush out whatever element was in my urine causing that false positive, there was still that stubborn little positive sign. Can we just say I shed a few tears? Not of joy?
Remember, I was the woman who embraced selfish, wore it like a badge of honor, and made it clear to every man I dated that if they wanted kids I likely was not the woman for them. How could this be real? WEll…..perhaps is was still just a string of “wrong” tests. So I did what any smart woman would do, I drove my happy (well, unhappy self) right down to my friends clinic and had my blood drawn. We weren’t wasting time with those silly tests anymore. We were going for the big guns, we were takin some blood!
I begged and pleaded for a rush job. I needed to know that this was all just a funny little string of mistakes. I needed to know that I was free to continue my selfish, carefree life of dirt bikeing, mountain biking and hiking, riding horses and all the other fun ourdoorsy things I lived for. And being 40 pounds overweight with a belly the size of a T-rex egg wasn’t gonna work for me and those particular hobbies of mine.
As the nail biting commenced, we waited. And waited, and waited some more. Finally, at 6 pm I got the call. My world crashed in around my me. I couldn’t breath. I was beyond stunned or shocked. I remember looking at Alan, tears running down my face, crying that I COULD NOT DO THIS!
But the fact was I could. We all can do things we don’t think we can do. We all have it within us to rise to the challenge. And remember, being single, 46 and pregnant wasn’t my only challenge. I was also facing the very real challenge of losing my business of 8 years.
To say I felt as if a lead cannon ball was shot right into my stomach is minor to how I truly felt. I was a single woman of 46 years old, pregnant, AND……a FAILURE. If I couldn’t succeed at a business, a practice I poured my heart, soul and cash into. how in the hell was I going to succeed at being a mom?
So many people I have to thank for being there to support me. I will be forever grateful. And at the same time, the words often spoken to me, meant to give me hope and support, were actually the very words I least wanted to hear. They just were not what this particular woman found helpful.
Join me next week as I discuss the words which were said with such love and kindness, but were actually the hardest for me to hear. For they simply did not resonate with me!
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