It's hard to dance with a devil on your back...

By all accounts, 2011 was the worst year of my life.

I started the year pregnant (my second try) and managed to pass through the first trimester with no problems only to have my hopes devastated midway through the second trimester. I spent my birthday getting seaweed stuffed up my cervix in order to dilate it so a D&E could be performed the next day. When you've tried and failed twice to have a baby, the feelings of inadequacy start to set in. It doesn't matter how many doctors tell you it wasn't your fault or that there's nothing you could have done, you start to wonder if there's something wrong with you.

But I forged ahead and tried not to let it get to me. I tucked away my feelings and tried to focus on something I could do right - writing. I gave all my effort to my job at IGN, thinking I was good at what I did, and that I was appreciated. Turned out I was wrong on that front too. A couple of weeks after busting my ass during E3, I was let go. It would have been one thing if the whole site shut down, but that wasn't the case. I was specifically selected from a group of editors and, for whatever reason, deemed not valuable enough to keep on. People have commented that I've seemed overly angry at this situation. Perhaps I have been, but when you're already lying on the ground, and someone comes up and kicks you, I'd expect you'd get angry at them too. Plus the anger was easier to express than the hurt.

Things could have gotten much worse if I had floundered around looking for a job for an extended period of time. Thankfully, that wasn't the case. A group of people decided I was worth taking a chance on and offered me a dream job. Now I get to do what I love everyday, and I'm surrounded by some of the most talented people I've ever worked with.

But before I had even been at my new job a month, I got a surprise. I was pregnant. While trying again had been the plan all along, I had hoped to be more established in my new job before taking the plunge. My exact reaction to seeing the positive pregnancy test was, "Fuck!" Besides still trying to settle myself into my new routine, I also had not mentally or emotionally prepared myself for what I knew was going to be an extremely stressful experience. But it seems life doesn't care whether you're ready or not.

I coped by shutting down. I refused to talk about the pregnancy unless I had to and tried to forget that I even was pregnant. I had bottled so much up that my first visit to the perinatologist ended with me in tears. And then I started getting sick. This time around the sickness was particularly potent, which then required me telling some people at work (something else I had hoped to avoid until the last minute.) No matter what I did, it seemed this pregnancy refused to be ignored, and I've spent the last four and a half months "waiting for the bomb to drop," so to speak. Because expecting something bad to happen would make the blow less severe if it did come, I reasoned.

But then, over the Thanksgiving holiday, a couple of things happened. I don't believe in God or fate or anything like that, but even I have to admit that sometimes you find things - books, songs, even people - at the exact moment you need them. I had picked up Peggy Orenstein's memoir about her own struggles having a baby, called Waiting for Daisy. I had already read Cinderella Ate My Daughter during my previous pregnancy and loved it, and had hoped this book could maybe help me to de-stress a little bit. It ended up doing much more than that.

I don't know exactly what I had expected, but I hadn't expected to see my exact feelings being uttered by someone else, someone whose experience had been worse than my own. Parts of the book were very difficult for me to read, and I ended up putting it down more than once because I was crying too hard to continue. What struck me most about Peggy's experience was that no matter how hard things got, she never seemed to abandon all hope. She was able to come to terms with what was happening to her. I couldn't say the same for myself.

In the prologue she talks about returning to a ceremony of the religion of her youth, not because she necessarily believed it, but because she hoped to find "the courage to close my own book, one way or another, on this anguished chapter of my life." The same day I finished reading Waiting for Daisy, I heard "Shake It Out" for the first time and felt my baby kick for the first time. It seemed the universe was desperately trying to tell me something.

I've spent the last three years of my life, consumed by my inability to have a baby. I've made myself numb in an effort to avoid being hurt, but I've realized that is no way to live. I'm writing this on a Saturday. On Monday, I have a full anatomy ultrasound. This is the point where we discovered the problem the last time around. But rather than trying not to think about it, I feel a strange sense of peace. Even if this ultrasound comes back fine, there's no guarantee there won't be problems in the future. And I've decided I can no longer let the fear of tragedy keep me from living my life. As in the lyrics to "Shake It Out," "I'm ready to suffer and I'm ready to hope." I know that no matter what happens, I'm going to be OK. It's hard to express in words the depth of this epiphany I've had, but as a writer, I felt I had to try.