My hair falls around my face, like gravity is pulling at my temples. I brace against the bathroom counter so my shoulders point at my ears, and I hold on with all I’ve got because I can’t quite wrap my mind around the reality of that second faint line on the stick.

The rim of the sink is cold, sterile-looking as I speak. “Babe, get in here.”

Just two days earlier he’d brought an anniversary card. We knew the weight of the words it scripted. I’d told him how this was the first celebration in several years that seemed happy.

You see, that bending posture, those buckling knees had become familiar when Chase and I almost didn’t make it through the marriage thing. Much of our story has not been told in this venue. So many times I’d clutched the edge of something, mouthed through blurring tears, I just don’t know if I can do this.

“Are you sure? How did this happen?” he asks me.
Oh, I think you know, Buster.
“The line is barely…are you sure?”
“Yes. Trust me, I’ve taken enough of these to know. Plus the four other positive tests are difficult to dispute.”

A few nights later when the house is silent, when my fears grow large, and I struggle to make sense of what’s true, I get eye to eye with the One that can settle my heart. The One who has promised to never leave me though life may leave me ragged. It’s enough to cause me to take the first real breath since I found out.

I call my mom to tell her and get this, she laughs. Right out loud and everything.
“Well the way you said it was so…”
“Like, why not?”
“Yes.”
Why not build our own house, get a puppy for Christmas and throw a pregnancy on top? Why, the hell, not? 

It’s been an adjustment, happy as we may be. I wake up tired, feeling like I just went through the bulky cycle of the washer. I gag every time I brush my teeth, though I kinda do that anyway. Meals are every two hours. Though again, nothing much different there. I can’t stomach coffee, which is sacrilegious. And it’s all hit me faster than my brain can catch up. But I also know, I get to have a baby. I do not take for granted the gift that some would offer their soul to have.

“I still can’t believe you’re pregnant,” Chase says to me. “Oh my gosh, we’re going to be that family with all the kids.”

So we’re doing this. I take pause in the home he’s building us with his own two hands, where he’s shoveled 4 foot drifts for a concrete truck and organized every inspection with the county. Where we’ve prayed that this wouldn’t be our house but His. The place we want to make memories and bless and love well and do life. It’s in the center of the framed up living room when I look around and the swell hits me in the chest. You’ve given so much, brought us through when I thought You wouldn’t, and have filled this home in ways we never expected.

A friend who knows our story texted me after she heard the news. She’d uttered them over me, in my deepest season of hopelessness.
“I think you will have another baby. A healing baby to show the restoration of your marriage.”

Take hope my friends. Silent storms rage behind the scenes and though they may not be spoken of to very many, He is tender towards every tear you drop in secret. There is the other side. And when you think you can’t do it, you can. I’m living proof.