“What will you use this room for?” My mind quickly responds nursery, but mouth says “guestroom”. A lot of change has happened recently – we moved into our new home (!) and then the same week I was laid off due to restructuring. To be honest, I’m not so worried about the latter and there are plenty of things to keep me busy while I decide on my next career move. It’s also a great distraction from the absence of little feet running throughout our new home. OK, now I know how bad dealing with infertility has been given I just called my lay off “great”. Talk about perspective and relativity.
Our house has four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and a full basement. Plenty of room to grow into, plenty of room for a family. Of course, the ‘what ifs’ linger in the back of my mind – What if it’s just going to be the two of us? What if we don’t need this space? What if we’re planning for something that may never be? I have not uttered any of these what ifs to my husband, but sometimes I think I can hear the sauntering of a big elephant throughout these rooms.
We have our rooms mapped out and two will be guestrooms. I feel like having two guestrooms is just being PC in some sort of weird way. The first bedroom next to the master bedroom my heart has marked as the baby’s room, only there’s no baby…yet. As my husband and I start discussing bed options, there’s a voice in my head that asks “But, what if we get pregnant, shouldn’t we just leave this room a blank slate for now?” and then it’s followed by a louder voice of “Just leave this room alone – you have others!” I don’t say any of it though. Part of me was a bit surprised that my husband was quick to call it as a guestroom, but he’s more practical than I am and he does have a mother and brother who will visit. Even if I were to get pregnant this cycle, I suppose we wouldn’t create the nursery until the third trimester anyway. Yellow, light wood furniture, and elephant décor – that’s how I see this room. I’m very happy with my house, I’m happy decorating and making each room our own, but there’s something about this room in particular that makes me uncomfortable, I suppose that’s the right word.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being stupid and naïve at this point. Does it make sense to continue to make decisions based on someone we don’t have? I’ve done that for three years now. Stayed at my job longer than expected, took hormone therapy, visited my specialist 2 – 3x a month, sometimes a week, you know the drill. And now with the house, I find myself doing a little bit of the same. For example, we went out and bought new blinds – cordless please, as that’s child friendly – and stalling on buying furniture for that guestroom. I guess the best I can do is make our house a home, decorate for us and our current situation. I’ll make the “future nursery” into a beautiful guestroom, mind as well make it something nice to use while we wait for its future occupant. I think I’ll still choose a yellow paint though, it’s versatile anyway.
As for my job – I put my career trajectory on hold long enough…making decisions in the present based on future expectations…and that is a regret I have. This time around, I am aiming high, getting myself back together, and pursuing the career and professional life I aspired to. I seemed to have forgotten who I was during these last three years, but I feel like the woman I was is coming back stronger than before.