Today I’m interviewing Geochick, who blogs about becoming a parent through adoption. She prefers to maintain her anonymity, so there are no pictures today. However, I think you’ll find that she has some fabulous insight on the adoption process. Enjoy her adoption story!
Q. Tell us a little about yourself.
Hi there, I used to be a happily-married 30-something looking forward to starting a family a bit later in life than planned. Fast forward several years to almost-40-something and I’m still happily married with a toddler son who is adopted and nothing has gone according to that 30-something’s plan. In my non-family building time I’m a dam engineer (Geotechnical for any nerdy types reading this) and a Jazzercise instructor for fun. I also like to read gossip websites, and know way too much about celebrity lives.
Q. How long did you TTC and what issues were you facing?
My saga starts in 2007, the year of our 5th wedding anniversary, when we finally decided to get pregnant. Because that’s what you do- decide to “get pregnant”. That was in February of 2007, and I spent the bulk of that year staying optimistic that we just hadn’t hit the right combination of timing despite charting my temperatures and discovering I had a textbook cycle.
In January the following year, getting frustrated with no pregnancy, we went to a RE and ran through a battery of tests. Or rather, I ran through a battery of tests and my husband got to run through exactly one non-invasive test. After a clomid challenge, HSG, and the 3-day bloodwork, everything came back normal. He was fine, actually better than fine. The RE gave me the option of a laparascopy although she thought I maybe had a little bit of endometriosis, but nothing that could preclude pregnancy. I declined since the RE also said that I would probably conceive on my own and we could continue to try on our own with acupuncture. I had already been going to acupuncture for a few months, but we decided to go ahead and keep trying on our own.
By the summer of 2008, I was at my wits end given that both the RE and acupuncturist thought I should have been able to conceive on my own, yet I had never seen those two little lines and my cycle continued to be textbook. We went ahead with a clomid IUI cycle that summer, which failed.
After that failed, I was in deep depression, and my reaction to clomid was so crazy that I didn’t want to do another one. We languished for another few months, continuing to try acupuncture, and by the fall of 2008 I had had enough. I scheduled the laparascopy, which ended up showing minimal endometriosis that didn’t appear to be in any areas that would preclude pregnancy.
Following the lap, we tried 2 more medicated IUI cycles that failed. It was a dark time in our marriage and we basically stopped communicating given the grief we were feeling, my unrecognized depression, and my bad reactions to the medications (I got the crazies instead of the hot flashes). After the medicated IUI cycles failed, we stopped trying to conceive. At the end of it all, my official diagnosis is unexplained Infertility.
Q. What led you to decide to pursue adoption?
That’s an interesting question for me to answer. Neither one of us had been exposed to adoption, but both of us inherently knew that our end-game was to be parents. If we had to take a different path, then so be it. Early on in the TTC process, I made a conscious decision to avoid IVF. My thoughts regarding that were purely based on my specific case. A huge factor in the decision was that my insurance did not cover any IVF and it seemed ridiculous to throw money after a chance that I may get pregnant, when I could put that money toward becoming a parent. The pragmatism is crazy high in my household! Adding to that, I didn’t react well to Clomid, Femara, or the injustice of having a catheter shoved where the sun don’t shine in order to try to conceive. My life was literally falling apart at the seams: I felt that I had to make a break with fertility treatments or fertility treatments would break me.
After the first failed IUI cycle, I started earnestly researching types of adoption and adoption agencies in our city. Friends of ours were in the process of adopting themselves and it helped to demystify the process. We actually sent in the first application before I had my laparascopy, but when we received the second application with the fingerprinting and the forms and the fee schedule, we had to take a step back. At that point, we realized we weren’t quite ready to throw in the towel on trying to conceive, and we didn’t actually start the homestudy until February of 2009.
Q. What was the most challenging thing about adopting your son?
I’d have to say that there were three things that were the most challenging about Baby X’s adoption. First, from an adoptive parent’s view of the process, the entire homestudy process and grieving the loss of a biological child took their toll. Even though we thought we wanted to pursue adoption, we jumped into it too fast and had to put the brakes on our homestudy at one point in order to sit with the knowledge that we were never going to have a child with our DNA. It was tough to see our friends’ kids running around like mini-mes when we were forced to acknowledge that our mini-mes would really be mini-us, a combination of other people’s DNA and our environment. Despite my relative ambivalence toward pregnancy itself, it was tough to work through the grief that my body had failed me.
The second thing that was challenging was coming to terms with the inherent losses in adoption. We lost, or never had, the ability to conceive. Baby X’s mother lost her son. Baby X lost his mother. Even though we have an open adoption, and we strive to provide a safe environment for Baby X to express his grief should it surface, we can’t erase it. Everytime we have a visit with C, I’m reminded of the profound loss they each have suffered. My hope is that by approaching the adoption with openness, we help to relieve some of the loss, although it will never go away.
The third thing that was challenging was the lack of support from both family and friends. The inane comments are no joke, and I became a broken record of education that fell on deaf ears. More than once I was told that I would get pregnant after adopting. I’ve had family members treat me as if I’m some kind of savior. I’ve had family members dismiss Baby X’s mother in front of me. I’ve had friends and family assume that because we have a child that he fixes all my infertility grief. Now that we are more than 2 years into an open adoption people close to me still wonder at how I can “do it” because they “wouldn’t be able to”. It’s frustrating, and I’ve had to work very hard to stop jumping down people’s throats over their comments and start leading by example rather than talking at them.
Q. You brought a second child home only to have the mother decide to parent a few days later. How did you survive this emotionally?
Therapy got me through the grieving process when that match fell through. I had been doing therapy for almost a year, and had gotten clinical depression under control. Acknowledging that I needed to grieve helped get me through the subsequent months. I also stopped forcing myself to do things that I really didn’t want to do in order to protect myself. I skipped a friend’s baby shower, I slacked off a bit at work, and focused on doing things that made me feel good in the midst of emotional chaos. That being said, the entire summer was a blur for both DH and me as we worked through the loss. I grieved harder than he did and it caused some strife as the months dragged on and he seemed to get past it faster than I did. It wasn’t until the fall that I got to the point where I felt like I was back to the humdrum of waiting.
We also used it as a learning process, and when we recently got matched again, we were ready to stand up for ourselves, keep our emotional distance, and keep our mouths shut. When the first match fell through, I had made the mistake of telling everyone that Baby X had a new baby brother, and then I had to go slinking back to work without a baby, and announce on Facebook that the match had fallen through. On top of the phone call telling me that D had changed her mind, all of it added up to being the worst week of my life.
When this most recent match fell through because of circumstances beyond the control of the agency, there weren’t as many people to un-tell. That made it easier to weather the bad news, plus we had resisted a formal placement and told the agency that they needed to keep the cradle care mom (temporary foster care) on the case. Our caseworker told us that we were in a low risk situation, but the entire case fell to pieces anyway. Now, I’m not sure that I believe in any match being low-risk beyond all parental rights being terminated prior to the match, and I am not a fan of pre-birth matching either. There are too many variables for the expectant parents to work through without the added stress of parading potential adoptive parents in front of them as they try to make a life-changing decision.
Q. What advice would you give to someone who is considering adoption?
Research, research, research. Adoption is life-changing for everyone involved, and understanding the process and subsequent losses will make you a better parent. I find that reading adoptee and first-parent memoirs and blogs is helpful. It’s usually uncomfortable, and I find I have to take a step back every once in a while, or I’ll fall down a well of anxiety over our choice to adopt.
Q. What’s been the best part about adopting?
There are several things that have come up in the course of moving through infertility and adoption. I think it strengthened my marriage and my husband and I have each found we have strengths within us that we didn’t realize. It forced me to take a hard look at how I was raised, realize that’s not how I want to parent, and got me into therapy with a therapist that I jive with. It brought to light my own quasi-adoptedness, and the fact that I know nothing about my biological father. It gave me an opportunity to be a parent after my reproductive system failed me. It forced me outside my comfort zone, forced me to look at life differently, and to embrace a larger family unit for the sake of raising my children with an open heart.
Q. Anything else you’d like to tell my readers?
I wish I had been in therapy during our infertility struggles, as it would have been easier to recognize what I was going through and perhaps identify the underlying depression that was exacerbating all the situational stuff that was going on with the drugs and my reactions to them.
I also encourage them to go to the best RE they can find. We didn’t do that and only went to the one that was convenient to our location. Unfortunately, we have found out later that wasn’t the best choice.
And if you ultimately decide to take the adoption path, recognize that adopting is not a band aid for infertility. Many people outside of the process will think that when you become a parent, you should be fixed, but that is way too much to ask of a child. They aren’t there to fix us, we have to fix ourselves.
Many thanks to Geochick for sharing her experiences with adoption. Please leave a comment below to let her know you appreciate her sharing her adoption story, and please consider pinning this image so others can find her story.
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