The Beginning: "Trying"

It was summer of 2015 and I had been on birth control since late spring of 2009. Before he left for his deployment the fall prior, The Mister and I had talked about maybe starting to try to have a baby when he returned home. I was ready, but he was much more hesitant. Either way, I stopped taking the pill right after he left and was off until right before he returned home. By then, he and I were on the same page. At least about me starting the pill again. With it being our first deployment, we weren't sure how reintegration would go for us and we didn't want to throw getting pregnant into that mix as well. Plus, we were going to Bora Bora a few weeks after his return and I was very interested in making sure I didn't need to worry about taking feminine products with me. The pill puts you in control of such things : ) Anyways, I got back on the pill and our Bora Bora trip came and went. It was fabulous, by the way. I teared up on the boat back to the airport. It was just that good. Go if you ever possibly can!
I'll interject here and say The Mister returned home from deployment a very changed person. God used something we thought could only bring detriment to bring healing instead. Because of that, our relationship changed a lot. I type this, unable to stop the tears from flowing, grateful for the man that returned home to me. The one who stands beside me now, helping me through so much turmoil. Even if I never get anything else I want, I have more than I deserve in him.
Just another couple of short weeks after Bora Bora trip, The Mister went to Alabama for a five-week training course, necessary to keep him in the Air Force, and I flew out for a week towards the end. While there, I started having some major sinus congestion and flew home with what ended up becoming a sinus infection. I dread taking antibiotics, but the pain in my face was killing me. I finally capitulated and went in to see the base doctor. In that conversation, she assured me my pill would still be effective. That the study done actually only showed that subjects weren't successful in remembering to take the pill while on antibiotics, aka not feeling well, not that antibiotics actually rendered the pill ineffective. It made sense, but based on prior encounters, I didn't trust her. Around this time, I was feeling like the pill was wreaking havoc on my complexion and emotions anyway. So The Mister and I talked and agreed I would get off the pill, but we would still try to prevent getting pregnant. The other part of that "conversation" though was really an argument about whether we should start "trying" or not. I was beginning to fear how long we had waited and still might wait. Our sixth wedding anniversary had came and went, and my 30th birthday was a few short months away. The Mister still felt like it wasn't the right time, and I ended up choosing to honor that.
In September, as I entered some data into a fertility tracker I was using to avoid pregnancy, my fertile window shifted and I realized we had unknowingly had sex on what was supposedly my most fertile day! I panicked and called The Mister right away. A few days later, in a discussion about me possibly being pregnant, he told me he thought it was a perfect way for it to happen. Well, then. Ok.
The following week, on October 5th, a friend from our first base started posting about her miscarriage. I still don't know why it never occurred to me in the first place, but reading her story made me realize that we were banking on getting pregnant whenever we decided to start trying. We had never accounted for it to take a while. Not really. And we definitely had not given any consideration to the possibility that once we got pregnant, we could experience the loss of a miscarriage. I was in tears that night telling The Mister about it all, scared of what our path could look like. He agreed that we had been foolish in our expectations. The next morning, he called me from work to say he thought we should start trying to have a baby. He said it seemed like the timing of everything plus my desire was God's answer for him.
The very next night one of my dear friends lost her baby boy at almost 37 weeks. With her husband deployed and both of their families more than half way across the country, I showered and packed a bag, prepared to stay the night, and waited to hear that I could head down to the hospital to be with her. That dark night is forever engrained on my heart and in my mind. At the time, I was just a friend trying to love a friend in all the ways I knew how. This memory would become important later on.
Through all of this, we were holding it in the back of our hearts that I might be pregnant. However, I confirmed a week later that I was not pregnant, after taking two pregnancy tests. The first, I later realized, had expired one year prior... I'm so embarrassed, but that's how much of  a rookie I was at the whole thing! Knowing my period was a few weeks late though and yet I wasn't pregnant set the stage for realizing things weren't quite right in my body at that time.