I think one of the hardest things to convey to people who have not adopted is how miraculous it feels. I used to worry that it would feel as if adoption was second best, and that I’d always lament not having “my own child.”
That couldn’t be further from the truth. I surprised myself, actually.
In honor of National Adoption Month, for the first time ever (at least in raw, non-anonymous, blogging form), I am publicly sharing our adoption story. Rather, my adoption story. My husband’s and my son’s stories are their own.
It’s not a short story. Choosing adoption isn’t the result of a flippant conversation had over some sushi and wine. And for me, it was the emotional equivalent of choosing Six Flag’s El Toro after hanging out on Nitro for six years. I happen to love roller coasters, but emotional rides are far more exhausting and, frankly, nauseating.
In fact, I didn’t want to choose adoption right away. So it begins with Part I.
It was on an unusually warm, late winter afternoon that I sat on the patio in our backyard pondering over the last 5 1/2 years of our family-building journey. In short, it had been torture.
I recalled all of the treatments, the weight gain, the lost friendships, the strain between our families and ourselves, the utter loss of myself, and NOW…..now my husband and I were knocking on divorce’s door.
It wasn’t a pretty picture. The juxtoposition of that beautiful March day and the darkness in my head compelled me to run far away and never look back. Instead, I sat there quietly and closely examined my life.
Basically, it was shit.
I had never felt so alone, depressed, lost, and out of control in my life.
I blamed infertility, of course.
The gravity of what infertility took struck me as if I had been knocked out by an elite boxer. And worse, it could potentially keep wielding its nasty wreckage on our lives endlessly!
But somewhere in that shriveled up version of myself was a woman with a sound mind who was screaming, “Screw that! You’ve got a choice, lady!”
I made a decision that day to pick myself up off the damn floor, and not let infertility get me. I’d always been rather hard-headed (thank you, German ancestry), which added another layer to the difficulty of failed treatment after failed treatment. So I knew that I’d be able to get myself out of the hole I had fallen in, even if by one centimeter at a time.
And that’s what it felt like: One damn centimeter at a time. Yes, I made the choice to stop feeding the part of me that just wanted to lament. Yes, I decided to find “me” again by doing things that used to make me smile (even though I really just wanted to sleep). But, with each step, my legs were like lead weights.
With every fake smile and exhausting social exchange I felt like I just wanted to crawl back into the hole and stay there Ad infinitum.
But, I didn’t. Because, as Anais Nin wrote,
“…The time came when the risk for remaining tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
The darkness was too painful. So, I did the stupid gardening. And I hiked with the dogs, communing with friggin’ nature. And I sang annoying songs in the shower. And I moved robotically through the yoga poses. And the meditation…oh my god….the ridiculous meditation where my monkey mind was like, “Ha! Focus on yo’ breathing?? Puh-leez…how about a bunch of thoughts about what a loser you are? How ’bout that?!“
Something happens when one is depressed. Colors literally seem duller. Like someone put a light gray film over the universe. After several weeks of utilizing my German stubborness to go through the motions, I realized one day that I could see vibrant color again. The gray had begun to lift. I felt weird not hiking. I felt weird not gardening. I felt weird not medi…well, actually, the meditation still freakin’ sucked, but I was getting better at it. And I most definitely felt calmer.
The very first tangible thing that changed had nothing to do with trying to build a family.
I stopped needing my husband to be different than who he was.
He was (and is) kind of awesome. Ode to the hubby. Once I changed ME, things started getting better.
As Wayne Dyer wrote, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
We had gotten to a point in a relatively short period of time where we knew infertility hadn’t taken our relationship. And I had personally come to this miraculous zen place where I was being happy with what my life was like at the time. I no longer felt on the brink of an emotional breakdown any second, and those random crying fits at stop lights had completely disappeared.
We had three frozen embryos (totsicles, to my fellow IFers), and decided to try one more cycle. With my new zen attitude, I felt like it was going to work, but if it didn’t, I knew I would be okay. It’s weird to be all calm about a fertility cycle after 5 1/2 years of sheer madness. But, that is truly where I was.
My body was healthier, my mindset was healthier, and my marriage was moving toward kick ass.
That was the only cycle in which I ever got pregnant.
The only one. Sadly, the pregnancy didn’t last, and we had to face another failed cycle. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had that zen attitude when those embryos were made. But then, our miracle baby may not be in our lives today.
This time, I cried and was sad for a total of a day before I began to celebrate. Holy crap…My sanity was intact! I didn’t throw furniture across the room! I didn’t become a snotty mess, curled up in a ball on the bed!
I was free! Free of infertility!
Suck it, infertility! Wah-hoooo!!!! 
That was when we decided on next steps.
Living Child Free.
Yep. We were going to buy a summer house, go on cruises, travel Europe, have like twelve more dogs (okay maybe two more), and life was going to be grand. I can’t tell you how fun it was to dream during that time. The freedom was palpable! Living child free is a real, beautiful option, and I was wholeheartedly into choosing that lifestyle for us.
Precisely two weeks later, my dear husband said to me, “Ya know. I just really want to be a dad.”
And because I was all zen and going with the flow (or just super endeared to him and also happy to be a mom), our adoption journey began.
Happy National Adoption Month,
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