It’s still ADHD Awareness month I think. In order to spread awareness, I thought I’d get vulnerable and share a struggle I’m currently going through. I take medication that is a controlled substance. This means I have to pick up a paper prescription, deliver it personally, showing my ID to the pharmacy and once it is filled, pick it up personally, ID in hand. I also can’t fill it before the other runs out, and if I lose the prescription my doctor will likely not write a new one for me to replace it until the next month. I also can’t leave it with the pharmacy until it is time to fill it, they won’t store them for fear of theft. This makes sense, there is a lot of abuse and theft of controlled substances. …

I have been avoiding my Timehop app for the last month or so. I know what I was doing a year ago. I have been reliving the weeks over and over again all year. I try to relive how I felt before we knew: the light, carefree experience of bringing new life into the world. The fun of secretly unbuttoned pants hidden under an elastic band. Pinning different crib photos to my secret boards. Having two separate lists of names: one for the real ones and one for the ridiculous ones. A trust in nature, trust in my body. Trust in being on the right side of statistics. …

Having a miscarriage sucks, and it doesn’t get any better the second time around. There is a different energy to this one, and I am noticing more about how the patterns of the world around me change (or don’t) this time than I did in the shock of the first one.

In my first pregnancy, my pinterest feed was full of maternity clothes, baby crafts and nurseries. Facebook was full of friends announcing pregnancies or giving birth or showing images of their little ones doing neat thing that I liked with my heart full of secret camaraderie and hope. My search history was full of pregnancy life hacks, milestones and symptoms. I was excited, and when I am excited I do research. …

On Wednesday we went in for the second ultrasound of our second pregnancy. I was nervous and skittish. I had a hard time connecting with this pregnancy, which I figured was my heart being a bit overprotective of itself since I had lost the first pregnancy in September. The first one ended some time after we saw a heartbeat, which is not that common. I knew any pregnancy after that loss would have no “safe” point for me, and anxiety was just a fact of life that I would have to manage. I tried to tell myself throughout this pregnancy that I was probably growing a little embryo, but I was never really convinced. I checked repeatedly throughout each day for bleeding. I basically felt like I was waiting to miscarry again, an extension of the 9 days after I was diagnosed with a missed miscarriage in September. …

I found out I was pregnant in July. I was ecstatic, we had been trying and I was using all the DIY science I could to make it happen. It was fun, taking temperatures and looking for lines on pee sticks. And even more fun when it turned out it worked.

In September I learned it was over. We had just seen the heartbeat the week before, and we were starting to narrow down names and get our lives ready for major upheaval. And I was devastated. It was a missed miscarriage, meaning the fetus had died but my body hadn’t noticed. I chose to wait for my body to catch up to what the authoritative science had learned, to miscarry with no medical interventions. I spent 9 days knowing what was inside me wasn’t alive anymore, waiting for my body to know as well. It was important to me that my body figured it out if possible, so I could trust it again in the future. I was so grateful to the women that were open about their own experiences with miscarriage, online and in person. …