Confession

On the adoption front, I have a confession.

D is totally ready.  I am not.  We are pursuing it anyways.   We have gone through our interviews to update our home study.  We will soon be a 'family in waiting' with one agency.

I can tell I'm not totally ready because I don't have any desire to read the adoption books that are sitting on my nightstand or on my tablet.   I don't daydream about it, or read the internet searching for ways to bring our plans into reality.  Instead, I look up and read stuff on egg donation, and think about the emotional implications of a child being born from a donor egg.  I think about managing the grief of infertility.   Looking up adoption stuff rarely, if ever crosses my mind.

Adoption is the back up plan that I don't want to think about.  Because when we move on full steam ahead to this plan, it means that our last one failed.

I view our adoption plans, kind of like fishing.  If we don't start fishing there definitely won't be any bites.  Even if a perfect match were available for us, we'd never get it if we are not participating.  So right now, we're not casting our nets wide at this point.  We're just trolling, and if there was a bite, we'd be cautiously optimistic and hopeful.

What scares the shit out of me, is that we've now entered a world of negotiating social and medical histories.  Is two drinks per week acceptable to us, or 10? The social worker told us it's not a matter of if the birth mother drank, but usually how much, and for how long.  I'm scared of getting talked into a situation that I don't want to or can't handle.  And I'm scared of feeling guilty about not being able to give a baby with higher needs a home, despite wanting a child so badly.  It's a kind of grief that non-adoptive parents don't have to ever think about.

In our adoption meetings they talked about openness and how we would expect to manage a birth family relationship?  That part was easy, as we are open to a variety of contact and have had some similar experience with that in our embryo adoption plans (although I'd imagine that it would very different dynamics in a birth parent relationship).

The social worker asked, "Have you processed our feelings on lack of a genetic connection?" Yes.  Been there, done that.  Twice.

"How do you anticipate processing grief associated with the failure of our egg donation plans and/or not being pregnant or experiencing child birth?" Those my friends, are the questions the social worker didn't ask and are where things get very dicey for me.

I want this egg donor 'thing' to work out so badly.   Not being pregnant, controlling the gestational environment and giving birth would be a huge blow to me.

In our interviews with the social worker, I skipped the part about how I'm terrified to put another infertility failure under my belt.  I don't want to process any more grief because I feel like I'm at my limit.  Nope, not even a little bit more.  I'm angry and worn out.

We would get through it if this didn't work.  Right?  However it is terrifying to think about that possibility, as it seems like the Mount Everest of grief.

It would definitely would not be the smooth process of moving on from one kind of family building to another as I portrayed it to be.

So, I keep quietly hiking along with on our adoption plans.  Slow and steady.  Because who knows what is in store for us.