Coming clean, rumors, and gossip you WISH were true

I am terrible at keeping secrets. Waiting to reveal a surprise is torturous for me. I often force loved ones to open birthday presents early because I cannot handle the suspense. I get twitchy. I blush. I have no Poker Face. The last 2 weeks have been interminable for me.

No, I'm not pregnant. That's the office gossip I WISH were true.

I'm not expecting, but I have been (poorly) harboring a secret: Les was offered a tenure-track professor job, and he and I are moving back to Illinois in August.

There should be an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, shouldn't there?

Les graduated! He got a job! A REAL job! The school that told him they had given the job to someone else called him back and said "The first offer fell through! We want YOU!"

We can live in the same state! We can start our Permanent Job Life! We get to move back to place full of people we know and love, and not start over again from scratch! He got a job in a terrible market, in his first year after graduation!

I'm excited about those things, and I am bursting with pride that my SuperGenius's professoring dream has actually materialized, after so much anxiety and struggle and disappointment. Those are all things worth celebrating with exclamation points!

Yet somehow as soon as it came time to tell my boss and start talking to my work team, I felt clenched in a fist of sadness and grief. Suddenly, when the reality of leaving my job, our friends, our church, our neighbors, and the life we have built here sunk in, I was a little bit heartbroken. And surprised by the heartbreak. So I did what any emotionally mature person would do. I didn't tell them.

I didn't tell them, but everyone knew something was up. I backed out of a leadership role that I knew would take time to fill, explaining that I was just "too overwhelmed" to keep it. Two and Two started to come together. It went something like this:

1. Jill has decided not to lead the volunteer trip to Honduras.
2. Jill is acting REALLY weird.
3. Jill gets red-faced and twitchy when you ask her WHY she is not leading the trip.
4. Jill is in the bathroom a lot.
5. Jill is pregnant.

Yes, it's true. There were at least a few people who speculated that I was in the family way. I am not. But I thought I was pregnant when the chatter was starting to fly. I was now carrying TWO secrets (I think I'm pregnant AND we're moving away), and I did my best to squash the whispered "You aren't pregnant, are you?" questions with a sarcastic "Um, not in a million, zillion years."

I am a lying liar. I do want to have a baby, but it has taken me a really long time to admit it to myself, let alone to anyone else. So I was walking around with a flutter of hope that I was pregnant, while deflecting inquiries with a flippant "Hells to the No".

About a week ago, a dear and prayerful friend at our Raleigh church gently called me on my kind of messed up issues with wanting to be pregnant. It's one thing to not want to announce something before you know it's true, or before you're ready. It's another thing to feel like you have to try to convince people that you think babies are gross, and you'd just as soon welcome a Honey Badger into your house as give birth to a baby. "What's going on there?" she prodded.

What IS going on there? Well, it's complicated. But my friend helped me realize that I have been ashamed to admit that I want to have a baby. That I had made this change of heart akin to admitting I have a gambling addiction or coming out that I am secretly in favor of clubbing baby seals or something. I had decided somewhere along the line that Not Wanting to Have a Baby is part of who I am, and something I could no sooner give up than I could stop being a white woman. I have been too proud, too protective of what I want other people to think of me to let go and seek God's heart and path for our family. And, I wanted to hedge my bets. It's one thing to "get pregnant". It's entirely another to try and tryandtryandtryandtry and not be able to make it happen. If no one knows you're trying, no one asks you about it. No one knows your secret sadness every month it turns out that there is still only one line on the stick. You can just go blithely about like babies are the last thing on your mind, because your friends probably won't notice that you stare pining into every stroller that crosses your path.

Changing a piece of your self-identity is slow, hard work. It has taken me nearly 20 years to look in the mirror and say "Not bad!". Ugly, fat, gross, wobbly, and unlovable are no longer words I would use to describe myself (most days, though it is bathing suit season...), but it took WORK, and prayer and the Lord's help to strike those from the permanent record of my identity. And even now, I remember that in the early days of that paradigm shift, I felt like a hypocrite. Like I was betraying "who I am" by becoming confident and comfortable in my own skin. "I hate the way I look" and "I am too unattractive to be loved" were in the same descriptive category as "I am creative", "I have brown eyes", or "I love sharks".  Just part of who I am.

"I want to be a mom" does not compute. It doesn't quite yet fit into the way I see myself, or want others to see me. Yet. But it's getting there. One tentative step at a time.

Finally, after 2 weeks of thinking the cycle planning stuff had worked and we were really going to see those 2 pink lines, I realized that the "symptoms" were misleading, and I was not pregnant. Realizing that that double-whammy was not to be, I felt freed up to tell everyone the OTHER news. The true news. We are leaving.

And so we begin the 2 month goodbye. Everyone has been so great and congratulatory and pleasingly sad to hear the news. (Come on, you know you would be upset if no one was sad to see you go). I tell everyone that I am happy and sad for us, and that moving here turned out to be one of the biggest blessings we've ever had. I will miss Raleigh. It is a beautiful city, once you find your way around. And our friends have become dear to us. Every person, every new experience, every hug offered and drink shared and every bout of laugh-until-you-cry silliness has shaped and nudged and strengthened me for what's next. I'll be returning to Illinois a changed woman. Why not embrace that that change includes a hopeful mom-to-be?