Guest Blogger: Why We Chose Adoption

Ok, I’m a virgin at blogging so you’ll have to bear with me.  I’m actually having a bit of a mental block and I can’t really blame it on any meds—dang!  I agreed to be a guest blogger because my IF story is probably a bit different than some. 

Long, long, ago in a southern town far away my hubby and I had just agreed to start trying to have a baby.  1 month into trying, I had a horrendous stabbing pain in my lower abdomen and felt a pop.  Long story short it was a cyst rupturing and based on my ultrasound my ob/gyn could tell that I wasn’t ovulating due to the lack of thickness of my uterine lining.  You’d think that I’d be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t struggle for months or years before they find something like this out.  Well, this story pretty much goes downhill from here.  So we tried everyone’s favorite drug Clomid for 4 cyles and nothing.  I was ovulating but it just wasn’t happening.  Wonderful, darling hubby was ordered to have a SA and BAM!…right between the eyes we get the knockout punch.  We get referred to a RE who tells us our only chance of getting pregnant would be IVF with ICSI.  Apparently hubby’s swimmers are few and far between and they like to swim sideways.  Great!  Yeah! 

About 5 months after we get our news, we give our IVF a shot (no pun intended).  Everything was looking good.  I felt like a freakin’ chicken with all the follies (20) growing inside of me.  My hubby joked about me being intimate with the “wand” since it and I saw each other every other day for 2 weeks.  I took off from work so I just chilled.  Retrieval day came and I had wonderful looking follies and they were able to get eggs from 15 of them and 13 good looking embryos from that.  We did our transfer on day 3.  Transferred 2 and had 11 to freeze.  We thought our chances were looking good…if not for this IVF then a frozen transfer.  Well, the RE wanted to wait until day 5 to do the freeze and none of the embryos made it.  I guess I knew in my gut that we wouldn’t have a viable pregnancy either.  But, I was a good little patient and braved my progesterone injections for 12 days.  My butt might never be the same.  And then we get the call that we had a BFN.  I bawled like a baby.  My strong hubby did too.  The nurses who cried along with us asked us to come talk with the RE in a few weeks. 

Well, like the obedient couple we are, we made an appointment to talk with the RE.  He basically said that he didn’t know why things didn’t work out.  With 13 embryos, one of them should have survived either in-utero or in-vitro.  He said that if he were in our shoes, he might consider giving IVF one more try, but if it didn’t work then he didn’t think us getting pregnant would ever happen.    We had a lot of thinking to do.  We had to think about our finances, how many more hormones I could handle, what a family meant to us and how far we were willing to go to have one.

We did our thinking separately for awhile.  I think that we both needed to process things in our own time and our own way.  I was looking at options and statistics and costs on the net.  Hubby was internalizing things.  We also had a lot going on in our lives but a few months later we decided to have THE TALK. 

We knew that we wanted to be parents.  That was obvious.  We didn’t have an endless supply of cash.  That was pretty obvious too since I still haven’t been able to find a money tree at the local garden center.  Hubby was rational, I was emotional and we both agreed that our chances for a baby were slim even with another IVF.  We just couldn’t justify the cost for such a slim chance.  So, we decided to adopt.  Now, we both come from families with adoption histories so adoption wasn’t new to us.  We decided that adoption was the best way for us to be parents.  But we had to ask ourselves a lot of tough questions that I think most people who consider adoption should ask themselves: 

1.      What age child did we want to adopt?

2.     Can we love someone else’s child like our own?

3.     What races/ethnicities would we consider?

4.     Would we be willing to adopt a child with special needs?  Do we have the resources to do this?

5.     What will our families/friends think?  How will they treat an adopted child?

6.     How long are we willing to wait for a child?

7.     How much are willing to spend on an adoption?

8.     Domestic or International?  Private or through the state?  Agency or attorney? Open or closed?

We made the decision to begin the adoption process for China.  I had a new sunny outlook.  I had paperwork to organize to keep me busy.  I was in a paper pregnancy and was ecstatic.  We talked about names for a little girl and I even bought a few dresses.  Our paperwork was waiting in China for our little girl to be matched to our family.  We were waiting as patiently as we could but knew it could be 18 months or so until we heard anything. 

Then…we got a call from my mom.  A friend of hers was approached by a birthmother and to make a convoluted story short the birthmother was looking for a family for her unborn child.  Mom asked if we were interested.  All I could say was “Oh my God”.  The birthmother was 12 weeks along and adoption was the only option she would consider.  I cautiously approached my husband and we decided to guardedly explore this option.  We shared letters with the birthmother through my mother’s friend and eventually through our attorney.  We bit our nails for the next 6 months.  The birthmother didn’t go for prenatal care (this was her 2^nd baby) so that made us a bit nervous.  Finally, When she was 26 weeks pregnant, we talked her into having an ultrasound and a 4-d ultrasound and it was amazing.  I rushed to my attorney’s office and got our copy of the disk and the pictures.  We also found out that she was having a little boy.  My husband was over the moon.  If everything worked out, he would have his fishing buddy.  She FINALLY started going for prenatal care around 30 weeks and our son was born on the 2^nd week in September.  The birthmother never changed her mind…the whole time.  Her and the birth father signed away their rights and we brought OUR son home from the hospital.

My son is almost 2 ½.  He’s built just like my husband and has his hair and eye color but my skin tone and full lower lip.  It’s weird how much he resembles us.  He is our son and will always know how much we love him and how much his birth parents loved him.  I like an adoption saying I heard on the radio…my son’s birth parents didn’t give him up they gave him better!  And that takes love.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we did cancel our application for the adoption in China but only after my son’s adoption was finalized.

Now, as the mom of an adopted child, I can say that there are some definite advantages to adoption over pregnancy/child birth:

1.      I don’t have stretch marks.

2.     My boobs have stayed the same…just like the rest of my body.

3.     I didn’t have to worry about recovery time.

4.     No worries about natural versus medicated child birth.

5.     No hemorrhoids.

Yes, I there are some things that I wish that I could have experienced with a pregnancy, but I don’t have any regrets about our decision.