on good news, and dodging the odds

Last Thursday, after two weeks of waiting, we heard from the geneticist with results.  I was sitting on a boat in Florida, visiting my mom and step-dad, when I heard the good news.  After I hung up, after I knew that as far as any test could show there wasn't any genetic problem, I was thankful for those little club feet.  Those perfect, little, turned-in-on-themselves feet.

For a few days I suffered from some version of survivor guilt.  I didn't know what to say here after the nerves had passed and I knew that I had dodged some sort of odds bullet.  That in one day the geneticist may have made several other calls, with different words, different outcomes, different lives changed.

It would have been alright.  We would have been ok.  I know that.  But I also know that our lives were just made easier by not having to hear something different from that call.

I haven't written here this winter because I thought it would be a jinx.  I worried about getting my hopes up only for something awful to happen.  I didn't mean to let that negativity slip in, but I couldn't shake the feeling that our happiness could be taken away.  When Mike's Dad got sick we postponed our engagement to focus on family.  He passed away a year later and we postponed again because it was all just so sad.  Finally, when things were calm, we moved forward.  Only to have the tragedy of tragedies strike just a week before the wedding.  You can understand my hesitation. 

I don't believe that the world works this way.  I don't believe that there is some hand of fate that builds you up just enough to knock you down, but I couldn't be sure.  And so I wrote quietly.  In the notes app on the phone.  In scribbled margins of work notebooks.  But I didn't write any of it here.

But maybe I should.  Maybe now that I remember that good news and bad news comes and goes and we still move forward, maybe I'll remember what it felt like to share it here.