I’ve been reading a lot in the last few months, and one of the hardest things to read are those people who have reached the end of their journey. I just simply couldn’t fathom it for myself – cannot, could not, picture a time or place where I could give all this up. I’m a very tenacious person when I want to be. Even when I got to a point where we’d tried everything, if my body’s still ovulating there’s still always hope, right? So how could someone ever get to the point of giving up completely? How can you do that?

That popped into my head today while I was thinking about testing. And I realized, it’s not so far-fetched as I’d thought. You don’t go from step A to Z in one leap – you loose the battle a little at a time. First I lost the excitement and expectation of a BFP. But that’s not really a solid, definable step. It just sort of happens, and you don’t know where along the way you lost it. But testing… testing is solid, concrete. It was when I was laying in bed early yesterday morning trying to convince myself that it was worth getting up and testing that it really sunk in – I can’t do that anymore. It was always a “just in case.” And yes, I’m very stubborn – I really do want that chart and that early BFP when I get pregnant. I want to savor it. I want to be able to say I got my positive early. And it’s hard to give up that hope, even when you don’t really believe it’ll happen, the hope remains. Just in case.

So when I was laying there, I realized I’d lost that hope. That the early testing thing that I used to do with such abandon, it wasn’t going to work anymore – despite all that stubbornness inside me. I had reached that line. I have taken one more step. It’s so hard for me to let go, even just a small piece like that. It takes a lot of disappointment and a lot of failure to get me to that point.

But I no longer don’t understand how people can give up totally.