oh hai, I won

A couple months ago, I was over the moon to have found out my blog was nominated for the 2015 Hope Award for Best Blog.  You can see my post about it here:

The Little Blog that Could

I never really thought I would win.  It's such a cliche, but I really was just so happy to have been nominated.  Clearly, I totally underestimated the power of the awesome community I am a part of at ThenComesFamily.com.

One of the admins of the site graciously posted about my nomination along with a link to vote.  But it wasn't until she pointed out that given all the support from those on the site, I might want to start thinking about what it meant to win.  I had kept my real life identity purposefully separate from my online identity.  In fact in the beginning when I first signed up for the site, I had been so paranoid about anyone knowing what we were going through that I had used my middle name, rather than my first name or my commonly used nickname, on the infertility support groups.  My blog remained completely anonymous; you may have noticed I never even refer to my husband by name.  I didn't even tell many people I was close to in real life what was going on.

As the months went by, I started to open up to some close family members.  My mom was shocked to learn all that I was doing each month.  Once the loss occurred, I really noticed a shift in my openness.  Sadly, a lot of this was out of complete despair - it was hard to act normal or talk about much else in those first few weeks after the loss - but it was something else too.  I was actually mad - mad that I didn't feel like I could talk about what had happened.  I felt like I had to be hush, hush, and that many people didn't know what an appropriate response is, because people typically don't talk about these issues.  Quite frankly, I stopped giving a shit, and decided that if I wanted it to change, I was going to have to at the very least, start talking about it myself.  And so I did.  I told more family, I opened up to friends, and I even spoke to some coworkers.  I could tell I made a couple people uncomfortable, and I felt silly in those instances, but now I don't give a shit about that either.

At this point, I was ready to "go public".  My husband was much more reluctant, and so I of course respected his wishes.

It's about at this point that I got the nomination.  So I shared my blog with more friends and family, still keeping the circle tight for my husband's sake.  To his credit, when I asked what we would do if I won, he was completely supportive.

And then...I won.  I actually won.

And all anonymity went out the window.

As I have said in previous posts, I always thought that my social media announcement of pregnancy would be coupled with a reference to what we had gone through to get there.  When it came time however, I decided not to.  I wanted our happy news to stand on it's own.  Every other step of the process came coupled with fear and thoughts of our loss - I wanted to separate the two. 

But here we are several weeks later, a month out from getting an amazing award (which I plan on posting about on social media), and it just so happens October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness month.  No better month to do my little part in bringing awareness.  Here goes nothing...