Why I Want to Adopt

Do not attempt to adjust your computer screen. You are reading this right.

I did not realize how much training for a 10k distracted me from my grief, until I stopped running. I ran the 10k race on Memorial Day and didn’t go running again for another 10 days. In those 10 days, a new wave of grief emerged.  Four days later, I become unglued on an emotional meltdown so disorienting, I took a sick day from work. I had dinner on a pint of chocolate ice cream (dairy free, of course) and a chocolate bar. So yes, to answer Mrs. LC’s question, I do eat lots of sugary things with chocolate in them as a way to try to soothe my pain.

Then on the day of Magic and I’s wedding anniversary, instead of celebrating five years of marriage, I grieved the five years I spent trying to have a child with him. I saw my first RE just two months after we got married. I grieved the loss of having a daughter who would look like a combination of the two of us. Just when I thought I was really over my genes, I’ve grieving it all over again.

I think I’m beginning to get used to this pattern. Just when I think the grief is resolved, it hits me again, when I’m least expecting it. Just when I thought I was over believing in miracle pregnancies, here I am, believing it might just happen for me…again. Denial. As Magic says, it’s his favorite river. Apparently, I’m fond of this river too. Sigh.

I told myself that after the BFN of the last IVF with my own eggs, I would give myself 6 months to grieve and not think about anything baby-making related. While the weight-loss regime and 10k training served as distractions, I admit that I was not very good at not thinking about my next scheme about having a child. I thought about it a lot.

Now, it’s six months post-BFN and I have arrived at a place I really didn’t think I would be. I have always thought about adoption. When I realized what IVF was all about 5 or 6 years ago, I would have rather adopted, but Magic was adamantly against it. Now, adopting seems so right for me for many reasons. Let me list them here:

1. Genes do not make a family. Yes, it’s kind of a nice perk, but I can’t say that genes have made my family particularly close. As a stepmom, I’ve been in training for years to love children that aren’t “mine”, at least not in the genetic sense. I know I can love children that are not genetically related to me.

2. Pregnancy is a bad idea for me. As much as my body wants to be pregnant and tells me it wants to be pregnant, my brain knows it’s a really bad idea. Part of what unglued me a week ago was reading a tragic story of a local woman who most likely has post-partum depression/psychosis and killed her 6 month old son. I could see myself in this woman. I knew it could have been me. Just the short time I was pregnant with the prenatal depression and anxiety I experienced is enough for me to know that I would have been the post-partum train wreck. The other thing that triggered me about this woman’s tragic story is that I believe it could have been possible that my mother tried to smother when I was an infant. This never even occurred to me until I was pregnant myself, and I started having unexpected vivid flashbacks of my young childhood. Memories that are very difficult to access. I’ll never know if this suspicion I have is correct, because I think that even if it did happen, it’s not something my mother remembers or will ever acknowledge. This isn’t just the run-of-the-mill trying to dig up some trauma to blame my parents on. I had a recurring nightmare as a kid of being smothered. It was a very abstract dream, so it took me a very long time to make this connection (42 years, to be exact). It’s either one of two things: 1) birth trauma, possibly from being born breech, or 2) someone tried to smother me at a very young age. Long story short, pregnancy = mental illness for me. Not something I want to try at home ever again.

3. Cost. Getting practical here, donor eggs is going to cost $40k minimum. I don’t have that kind of money. Nor, do I want to gamble that much money on something that has the chance of not working. Which leads me to…

4. IVF sucks. I think I can safely say that I’ve been traumatized by IVF. I don’t think I could go through another IVF cycle without some guarantees, which isn’t going to happen. My body cringes when I think about going through it again. I don’t particularly like that putting one embryo back doesn’t guarantee that you end up with one child. I don’t like that wildly out of control whoops-your-embryo-split kind of surprise. You can have too much of a good thing. I could suck it up and go through that all again, but it brings me back to #2, and with the artificial hormones, that makes prenatal depression and anxiety all the more likely.

5. Human beings are hard on the planet. This is a big one for me. Everyday, I see how we are poisoning our world. I think of that big oil slick in the Gulf, and I get sick at the idea of creating another human being who is going to be using up lots and lots of resources. I work in the environmental field, and it breaks my heart to see natural areas being bulldozed for housing developments. I read stories of floating islands of plastic in our oceans. Climate change is here, and it is undoubtedly from the amount of fossil fuels we are burning at an astronomical rate. Being in the environmental field, climate change and how to manage for it is a huge unknown topic that is looming large in the scientific and applied sciences right now. There will always be children to adopt. I feel better making a difference in the world through adoption rather than adding to the world population crisis.

6. I want to be able to ask for one girl and get one girl. I know this sounds picky, but we really want just one child and we want that child to be a girl. I know several people who have adopted and have been able to ask for the particular gender of the baby they wanted. They may have had to wait a little longer, but in the end, they did get what they wanted. If you’ve been following my story for a while, you’ll know why it’s so important for us to have one girl.

7. I like the idea of open adoption. I think this can be very healing for all involved. I think because of where I am at now in life, I can have compassion for what a woman would go through to give her child up for adoption.

I don’t know if I am going to adopt. For the first time ever, a crack has appeared in Magic’s wall of opposition to adoption. He sees how sad I am. I explained to him my reasons that I have listed above, and he agreed that they made sense, particularly the part about PPD. He saw what I went through when I was pregnant. He gets this part more than probably anybody else could.

So, what’s next? Magic and I need to explore this more in counseling. I know the perfect person to see. I just need to make the appointment. I haven’t made the appointment yet because I want to make sure this is the right thing for me. I want to make sure that this is my heart speaking, and not just my hormones and not just my instincts. That’s a very hard thing to pull apart. Let’s just say, I’m not there yet.