After the Storm, a Rainbow: Our Pregnancy Announcement

Okay so — grab your coffee, sit down, and let me tell you the thing I have been sitting on for weeks, biting my tongue at every single mom-group meetup, every school pickup, every time someone glanced at my stomach a beat too long and I had to physically will my face to stay neutral.

We’re pregnant.

If you’ve been here a while, you know this isn’t a small announcement for us. I wrote about the fear that showed up the second we started trying again — the fear that maybe my body only had one easy pregnancy in it, that Luke and the baby we lost had both happened so fast it felt like luck, and luck doesn’t always come back around twice. Getting Luke took exactly one well-timed try. I didn’t know, back then, how much that would end up messing with my head later — how “it happened fast for us” would quietly turn into “so if it doesn’t happen fast this time, something must be wrong.” So when I say this pregnancy feels different, I mean it feels earned in a way I genuinely wasn’t prepared for.

The two lines

I took the test on July 17th, and it had absolutely nothing to do with hope or dread. I wanted to take a dewormer — glamorous, I know — and you are not supposed to take one if there is any chance you might be pregnant. So I tested purely to rule it out, purely so I could take a pill with a clear conscience and get on with my day. I was not thinking about babies. I was thinking about parasites.

I peed on the stick expecting one line, a green light, and absolutely nothing else, then set it face-down on the edge of the sink and went to go put laundry away so I wouldn’t stand there staring at it like a crazy person.

I stood there staring at it like a crazy person.

Two lines. Except the second one was so faint I had to tilt it toward the window to convince myself it was actually there and not just my own eyes doing wishful math. After everything with the loss, I do not trust a faint line for even one second — a faint line felt like exactly the kind of thing that could still turn into nothing. So I took another test. Same result: a real line, but a shy one, the kind you have to squint at twice before you believe it.

That was not going to cut it for me. I am, if you have read literally anything else on this blog, a woman who wants data, not vibes — so I dug a digital test out of the cabinet, the kind that skips the two-pink-lines guessing game entirely and just prints an actual word. A minute later, it did not make me squint at anything. It just said it: PREGNANT.

I sat down on the edge of the tub and did absolutely nothing for a solid few minutes — didn’t cry, didn’t call anyone, didn’t even really think — just sat there letting my nervous system catch up to what that one word was telling me.

Because here’s the thing nobody quite prepares you for after a loss: a positive test isn’t automatically joy. For me, at first, it was mostly just — data. Information I wasn’t ready to trust yet. My brain went straight to logistics instead of feelings: when’s my due date, when’s the earliest appointment I can get, how many days until I’m past where I was last time. Joy came later. Joy had to be let in slowly, on its own schedule, whether I planned for it or not.

Fourteen weeks of a very loud silence

So we didn’t tell anyone. Not right away, and honestly, not for a long time after that either. We told exactly the people who needed to know for practical reasons, and then we just lived inside it. Quietly. Carefully. I went to every single early appointment half-braced for bad news, the way you’d expect from someone who’s heard bad news in that exact kind of room before. I remember sitting in the waiting room before the first ultrasound doing that thing where you try to prepare yourself for the worst so it won’t hurt as much if it happens — which, for the record, does not work, it just means you get to be anxious and sad instead of picking one.

Meanwhile, life did not pause to accommodate my secret. My wild, fishing-obsessed boy turned five this month, and this year we skipped the big backyard party altogether — not because we didn’t want to celebrate him, but because I was too nauseous to survive a house full of fifteen kindergartners and pretend I was fine the whole time. So instead, Luke got to pick his own special things to do on his actual day, one at a time, just the two — well, three — of us, which honestly suited him better than a party ever has. He had absolutely no idea the real reason behind the change of plans. I just quietly ran on saltines and gratitude and let him pick.

The exhaustion in the first trimester is a special kind of stupid, by the way — the kind where you fall asleep mid-sentence explaining bedtime rules to a four-, then five-year-old, and he just keeps talking at you like nothing happened. I was tired in a way that felt almost insulting, on top of trying to act completely normal at every single school drop-off and every single “you doing okay, you seem quiet lately” from a friend who had absolutely no idea what she’d just stumbled into.

Today I’m fourteen weeks and two days. Twelve weeks came and went a couple weeks ago — that’s the number everyone waits for, the one where the odds finally start leaning back in your favor — and I let myself exhale a little then. But if I’m honest, it’s really only now, a bit further out, that I’ve started letting the word “when” creep back into my sentences instead of “if.”

I’m not going to pretend any single week flips a switch and the fear disappears. It doesn’t. I don’t think it fully leaves you once you’ve had a loss — I think it just gets quieter, and makes room for something else to sit next to it. But there is room now. There’s room for excitement. There’s room to imagine Luke as a big brother, ordering him around the way only a soon-to-be five-year-old absolutely will. There’s room, finally, for a rainbow.

Why “rainbow baby”

If the term is new to you: a rainbow baby is what a lot of us call a baby born after a loss — the idea being that the storm was real, the grief was real, and the rainbow doesn’t erase any of it. It just means something beautiful showed up on the other side of something hard. I didn’t love the phrase at first — it felt almost too tidy for how messy this whole process actually was, like it was trying to wrap a bow on something that still feels, some days, like an open wound with really good days mixed in.

But fourteen weeks in, watching Hubs quietly start recalculating the garage into “gear storage for two kids now” without either of us saying a word about it out loud — yeah. Rainbow feels right. Not because it fixes anything about what came before. Just because it’s true.

What’s next

I’m not sharing a due date or bump photos today — one thing at a time, friend, let me have this one moment first. But I do want to tell you what’s coming on the blog, because a few of you have been asking since my honest ovulation tracker review: I tested three different methods trying to get pregnant again after the loss, and I have opinions now, backed by an actual outcome instead of just vibes. So that post is coming soon — which one actually worked, which one I trusted the least by the end, and which one I’d hand to a friend going through exactly what I went through.

For now, though, I just wanted to say it out loud, here, where I say everything else out loud. We’re having a rainbow baby. We are so, so happy. And I am so glad you were here for the hard parts, because it means you get to be here for this part too.

If you’ve been reading along since the harder posts — the loss, the fear, the long stretch of not knowing — thank you for staying. I know some of you found this blog because you were going through your own version of the exact same thing, googling at 2 a.m. the way I used to, looking for someone who’d tell you the truth instead of a Pinterest-perfect version of it. I hope this particular post is the truth you needed to see today: that the waiting can end, that the fear doesn’t have to be the last word, and that sometimes the good news really does arrive, even after it feels like it never will.

I’ll keep telling this story the way I tell all of them here — honestly, imperfectly, with more oversharing than is probably strategic. Thank you for wanting to hear it.