This week, I was looking at a list of acronyms that are commonly used in texting and on internet forums. One immediately caught my eye - "BFN".
But it seems that to most people, "BFN" means not "Big Fat Negative", but "Bye For Now". I chuckled a bit to myself about how my world view, once again, is out of kilter with most other people's at the moment.
And then I got to thinking. Actually, "Bye For Now" is quite an appropriate phrase to describe the feeling you get when that mythical second line fails to appear for the umpteenth time.
It's bye for now to the hopes and dreams that you've built up - that this will be your month, that the cycle was successful, that your dream of becoming a mother is finally going to come true.
It's bye for now to the plans that you had for telling your DH that he's going to be a father, telling your parents that they're going to be grandparents, and publishing cryptic status updates on Facebook.
It's bye for now to the dream of holding a baby nine months from now.
But it's just bye for now, and not goodbye for ever. Because even if it's the last natural cycle before you start fertility treatments, even if it's the last IVF you can afford, even if you've reached the end of the line with your own eggs, your own partner's sperm, or your own uterus, even if it drives you into the pits of despair from which you don't emerge for days or even weeks... even then, those little green shoots of hope will return again one day.
You might have a different plan, you might be looking at a different way of building your family, but you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and begin once again to hope, to dream, to plan and to pray.
So maybe it's not so daft after all. And maybe next time I'm staring at a whiter-than-white test window and feeling all my hopes and dreams flying out of the window, I'll be able to look at it not with the air of finality that "Big Fat Negative" brings, but with the knowledge that one day, I'll be ready to pick myself up, work out my next step and carry on.
Bye For Now. Not the end, but a temporary blip. I think I like that idea.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Au revoir rather than goodbye... I like it too. Glad you have a date for the new clinic honey, even if it is sooner than expected! Perhaps there's a plan working itself out here - relax and go with the flow!
ReplyDeleteSending you all our love as always, from an incredibly hot and sticky Grahamstown XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
It's certainly a much more pleasant and positive way to look at it. :)
ReplyDeleteawwww, that was great! I never really liked writing bfn before (because I didn't really get why a negative result had to be big and fat, its just negative to me, the size is irrelavent!) but you just gave me another perspective. Much better!
ReplyDeleteWhat a great post. It makes me think differently about the BFN acronym.
ReplyDelete