Not flesh of my flesh

Not flesh of my flesh
Not Bone of my bone
but still, miraculously, my own.

Never forget,
for even a minute
You didn't grow under my heart, but in it.

I love this poem.  It is the adoption creed.  It is beautiful.  I captures everything i feel about the special little boys and girls in my life: my nieces and nephews, the children of my friends, and cousins.  And yet, i know that I will love my own child even more than i love each one of these special children i have had the honour of watching grow up.

I need to say that we have not ruled out adoption.  In fact, in many ways, adoption appeals to me much more than the idea of pumping my body with hormones and having the conception of my child occur in a sterile dish in a lab.  I say this as a reformed scientist.  It isn't a fear of technology in any way.  But it is an awareness of the very clinical and impersonal start of a miraculous journey.  The idea that my husband and i could be at work while our gametes are being mixed is... depressing.  Baby making is supposed to be so much more fun.

Plus, there's the astronomical cost.  Paying someone to shove something up my hoo-ha which cost $5000 to $12,000 to produce and then having to wait two weeks to find out if it stuck or not is more pressure than i think i can stand.  And the likelihood of success is 1 in 3.  I mean I wish the actual lottery had such good odds, but for baby making i wish it were better. 

Adoption actual has a lot of pluses as far as I am concerned.  First of all, we're a bit older than most parents of an infant.  Imagine if we adopt a 2 or 3 or 7 year old.  I feel like we might actually  comfortably into the PTA for our children's classes.

Second, I think that my husband and I are uniquely equipped to deal with a child who needs extra love and assurance that comes from being adopted.  I don't know much about it,  I am willing to learn. My husband has gone through growing up without a parent as his mom moved away when he was three.  He was left with a lot of scars that we worked to heal.

My husband is not quite as convinced as I am.  He has this manly idea of passing his genes on to the next generation.  I love to quip when he says this that his genes aren't that good.  "They are! My jeans are Tommy Hilfiger"... sigh... 

My husband does have a lot of reservations.  What can we handle? What about special needs?  What age?  What sort of psychological scars will an adopted child bring?  We've had some very serious discussions.  He agrees with me that giving birth to a child is certainly no guarantee that our child won't have special needs of one sort or another.  And going over the list there are many special needs we are well equipped to deal with.  It makes him feel more confident about his ability to love this imaginary adoptive child.  He even flushed one day as we drove by a Toys-R-Us.  "I just imagined buying our child toys after we've adopted him" he confides. I grin with pleasure.  He is becoming more comfortable with all of the ways we can use to expand our family.

So, the question then is why we are rushing head long into IVF instead of starting to adopt?  In part because we don't yet qualify as adoptive parents.  In order to ensure that a child is brought into a stable home it looks like in our jurisdiction we must have been in a stable relationship for 2 years before we can apply.  My interpretation of this would be two years of living together, a date that is still more than a year away.

But there is certainly something else, something more that you get by going through the experience of pregnancy and childbirth.  

Adoption is not the last chance after we have exhausted IVF...  But we don't want to wait for another year before we try something else.  We have to strike while the ovarian reserve is hot!

Hope everyone has a happy Easter with their families.

Missed periods and opportunities

I never know what to say.

We've only been married for 9 months, but we're old... I am 39, my husband 44 and this fact is not lost on any of our friends.  And so the comments come up, a lot.

And the funniest part is no one ever questions the if... they question the when.

Let me start with Saturday... we were at a party with some old and cherished friends of my husband's.  They all have kids... some one, some three, some through adoption or ivf or some through what comes naturally.  But they all have them.  And they all can apparently hear my biological clock.

I am drawn to kids.  I love the things they say, or how the brother and sister gang up to keep me trapped in our modified version of Mouse Trap.  I love how they will hop into my husbands lap and confess that her parents met each other before they met her, and when would we meet our kids?  And i actually love the one little boy who argues with me and tells me that I am a mom. Because i completely feel like I am.

The kids are too precious to me, each one of them funny and charming, and sometimes spoiled and difficult, but they are perfect.  You can see why their parents love them so much.  And this natural inclination in me, to listen to children as they talk, and play with them sitting on the floor in the midst of a pot luck where i was required to read name tags before addressing the veritable strangers who greet me as a best friend merely as an extension of the man I married, this is what leads them all to say "when we have kids".

"You are so natural, so maternal" says our host as she admonishes us to hurry up and get on with it.  See, the thing is... i'm a bit shy.  I can be dirty and raunchy and funny.  But this journey is so incredibly personal and so incredibly painful that I can't talk about it yet with my family, or friends, so far it is my husband and any hapless wanderers to this blog page.

I am fairly certain that this is why i have the blog.  Because i feel like i am able to confess my secrets, the way you might confess to a stranger on a plane who you will never see again that you cheated on your high school boyfriend.  It is cathartic and it prepares me for the question of "when" from the people in my life.

The problem is that for us it isn't a when.

On my 39th birthday i had my period start about a week early.  And then after 24 hours of a very minor period it stopped.  And I knew that we had finally got the best birthday present ever.  Our baby.  A pregnancy test on cycle day 27 revealed i was pregnant.

Two weeks later I wasn't.

It was devastating.  There's no other words.  The pain was unbearable, not just physically but my heart was wrenched from my body with the loss of that pregnancy.  And i knew then why you wait until you are 13 weeks to share the news.  Because the pain is so great that you carry that secret with you deeply inside what is left of your heart.

Our baby should have been born in May.  Which always leads me to think about where i should be right now in our pregnancy.  We should be fighting over names and picking out furniture for the nursery.  Instead I am peeing on ovulation prediction sticks again.

And the hardest thing is I never know how to answer the questions.  Do people want to know about my phantom baby that still lives in my memories?  Do they want to know the pain of each month realizing that the two week wait was for nothing.  Do I smile and laugh and pretend it doesn't matter and then collapse in tears in my husbands arms as soon as we get to our car?  Do people want to really know that we are "trying" and all the inherent unromantic it-doesn't-matter-if-you-are-tired-tonight-you-have-to precision of it all?

Or do people still think that the stork brings babies... and we just haven't bothered to call and order ours yet?