adoption chronicles

 After our first consultation with the adoption counselor in July, I felt a great deal of anxiety about the expectation that couples should have resolved  their infertility before embarking on the adoption journey. Resolved. What. It doesn't even look like giving birth to a real life baby resolves it at all, how could NOT having a baby and starting the process of adoption bring you any closer? It seemed to be one more thing I could be angry and indignant about. How could the world conspire to prevent us from being parents?

I knew about this. We talked about adoption with the psychologist at our clinic, and he was clear in stating that adoption agencies sure don't like it when couples come to them like they are backed into a corner. This was another thing that made me nervous about starting the adoption process this summer, so soon after the miscarriage, and in such rough shape emotionally.

But the alternative to not starting the adoption process was killing me. Waiting around for the effing biopsy, and mulling over the same donor egg vs donor embryo question over and over again, bombarded with doubts about my biologic capacity to grow a baby inside my uterus, all felt like a passive way of wasting time. And yes,  I know it isn't passive to grieve. BELIEVE me, all that crying and raging, and insulting people in two different languages when I am driving in my car for no reason at all is very active. But active grief does nothing to get you a baby.

We started our home study on Friday, after filling out the mound of paper work and the police clearances and the medicals, et cetera. I get myself fingerprinted tomorrow. The parent training starts this weekend. It's a little funny that the child psychologist has to go hear about attachment for 2 entire weekends, but there are no exemptions: the training is mandatory.

When we met with our social worker/adoption counselor - let's call her Gretchen, shall we - she asked us to talk about our relationship, as well as our struggles with infertility. Like probably 90% of her clients do, I explained that our experiences have been very painful and have challenged our relationship.  We said we were at the point where we needed to diversify our efforts to include adoption. And then a couple of things surprised me. First, I didn't start bawling, which I am prone to do these days every time I have to utter the words infertility and miscarriage. Second, Gretchen shared that the philosophy had changed quite a bit within the adoption world and that she felt it made a lot of sense to start the adoption process even if fertility treatments were still a possibility. It's not that I expected her to say that it was prohibited to do both, but just that we would be considered as too fragile, too eager, not ready enough. She actually praised us for our efforts to go about our process in a systematic way, understanding that time is such an enormous variable.

Was it her praise I was looking for? Not really. I just wanted us to be considered, to be accepted as a couple in waiting.  I just don't want another door to slam shut in our face. We have so few doors left.

Anyway, I can't say that what I am feeling is hope. That would be overstating things by three football fields. I am just putting one foot in front of the other.