The Thing With Feathers

I started cramping today so I know day 1 is looming it's ugly head and waiting just around the corner.  Probably tomorrow.

But today, I am going to focus on the good that happened yesterday.

As I wrote in my post yesterday, it was a rough weekend.  This emotional rollercoaster of infertility ebbs and flows and this weekend was just a low moment.  I am trying to push the car back up the hill today, slowly. 

Yesterday after I wrote that post I started looking up other infertility blogs.  I have been trying to find someone who is still on the journey like I am, someone who hasn't been a lucky one yet.  The blogs I've found and enjoyed so far have all had a happy ending of one sort or another (through infertility treatments or adoption) which is encouraging but I also just want someone that I can feel I am commiserating with, someone who is feeling lost like I am.

I googled "unexplained infertility blog" and found this blog: Unexplained x2
She also had a happy ending but something struck me while I was reading through her blog.  If you click on the link you'll notice the background.  The hummingbird at the upper right corner.

Hummingbirds hold a significant place in my heart.  They (in real life, pictures of them, the word hummingbird) seem to come to me when I need reassurance.  They are messages from my brother that everything will be okay.

You see, the night he passed away my next door neighbor told us that as we sat in our dining room at the front of my parents home, she (at her house next door) saw a hummingbird a flight in the window, flittering back and forth, seeming to be watching us.  Now this was a cold, rainy miserable night in March in Ohio.  There typically aren't hummingbirds flittering about.  Then we looked through this book my brother had about animal spirits (he loved animals and nature, was a bit of a hippie).  The entry for hummingbird talked about it being a symbol for resurrection, coming to people for reassurance in times of sorrow. After that, they seemed to come to all of us at different times- my parents, my brother's best friend while rafting on the Colorado River (the guide told her he'd never seen a hummingbird before on the river), my husband and I in our new home.  Then there was a day I was missing him like crazy and in our lecture they talked about the "hummingbird sign" on MRI.

So yesterday, it just struck me, things are going to be okay.  One way or another, things are going to be okay.

I kept thinking of that phrase "Hope is the thing with feathers" from the poem by Emily Dickinson.

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It asked a crumb of me

I've got the hummingbird, the thing with feathers, on my side.

And I'm gonna be just fine.

We're going to be fine.

Great actually.