Like most couples, adoption was not our first choice of how we would have children, but over time it became what made the most sense to us, and what we felt gave us the best chance at a child. After 10 years of infertility, which included all sorts of tests and treatments and surgery, we finally got pregnant...twice. But each of those ended in early miscarriage. I still can't really wrap my head around being pregnant. At this point a positive pregnancy test only means a lot of worry, near daily blood tests, and loss so I'm not terribly interested in it.
There's also the cost factor. Because of the nature of my miscarriages (both ectopic and nearly life ending), if we ever want to get pregnant we will need to do in vitro. Which is pretty expensive and at best only gives you a 30% chance of having a baby. And then there's all the emotional baggage for me that results from a positive pregnancy test as well as the crazy that ensues when I'm on fertility meds.
We had friends offer to surrogate for us, but that's a legally gray area, and that wouldn't be much different from in vitro, except it would use someone else's uterus. As far as we know my uterus is fine and it never made sense to use a surrogate unless we knew that I couldn't do it for us.
The biggest hurdle I had to overcome, was to change my focus and obsession from getting pregnant to having a child. The miscarriages helped this a lot. During my brief pregnancies, I had time to actually think about having a baby and being a mom. And I still wanted it. So much.
So we started looking in to adoption. We found a local agency and attended orientation and started the paperwork. I probably pushed us faster on this than Stewart was comfortable with, because he was still in law school and was super busy with that, and his internship, and he still had to take the bar and find a permanent job after that. And then I only added to his stress by freaking out about having a baby and needing to get going on it NOW. For this and many other reasons, my husband is worthy of far better of a wife. But that's another topic all on its own.
Over the years people have told us that we could always "just adopt" but I assure you that it is not that simple. It took a lot of soul searching before we were even ready to being the process. Then we had to do all the paperwork and attend the classes before the state would even allow us to adopt a child. And then we had to create profiles and print profile books and wait for an expectant mother to be interested in us and then we had to consider situations, all of which are less than perfect, and then we had to have contact with expectant mothers who were interested in us, and then we had to pull ourselves out of the abyss that comes after another couple was chosen instead of us and to not over-analyze everything we said in the phone conversation and psych ourselves us for doing it all again and again and again until we're maybe picked. It's rough. Really rough at times. So we didn't "just adopt" but we did adopt.
But it's what we needed to do and I'm forever grateful to our birth mother for selecting us. Gavin is worth everything we did to bring him home, a million times over. I honestly don't think my love for him would be any different if he had come out of my body, and I've even had a few moments where I forget that I didn't birth him or carry him for nine months.
We had friends offer to surrogate for us, but that's a legally gray area, and that wouldn't be much different from in vitro, except it would use someone else's uterus. As far as we know my uterus is fine and it never made sense to use a surrogate unless we knew that I couldn't do it for us.
The biggest hurdle I had to overcome, was to change my focus and obsession from getting pregnant to having a child. The miscarriages helped this a lot. During my brief pregnancies, I had time to actually think about having a baby and being a mom. And I still wanted it. So much.
So we started looking in to adoption. We found a local agency and attended orientation and started the paperwork. I probably pushed us faster on this than Stewart was comfortable with, because he was still in law school and was super busy with that, and his internship, and he still had to take the bar and find a permanent job after that. And then I only added to his stress by freaking out about having a baby and needing to get going on it NOW. For this and many other reasons, my husband is worthy of far better of a wife. But that's another topic all on its own.
Over the years people have told us that we could always "just adopt" but I assure you that it is not that simple. It took a lot of soul searching before we were even ready to being the process. Then we had to do all the paperwork and attend the classes before the state would even allow us to adopt a child. And then we had to create profiles and print profile books and wait for an expectant mother to be interested in us and then we had to consider situations, all of which are less than perfect, and then we had to have contact with expectant mothers who were interested in us, and then we had to pull ourselves out of the abyss that comes after another couple was chosen instead of us and to not over-analyze everything we said in the phone conversation and psych ourselves us for doing it all again and again and again until we're maybe picked. It's rough. Really rough at times. So we didn't "just adopt" but we did adopt.
But it's what we needed to do and I'm forever grateful to our birth mother for selecting us. Gavin is worth everything we did to bring him home, a million times over. I honestly don't think my love for him would be any different if he had come out of my body, and I've even had a few moments where I forget that I didn't birth him or carry him for nine months.
