While the rest of the country continues to get abused with relentless ice and snow, our little corner of the world has had unseasonably warm weather, clear skies, sunshine.  Things are blooming that have no business doing so at this very moment, but no one told them that, so they just keep poking their little heads up higher and higher and higher until they burst through the dirt to meet the sun.  I’m afraid that we are going to have a hard freeze one of these nights and it’s going to shock those little buds right back to the ground.  When tender buds that didn’t expect to get blasted by freezing weather do, they often don’t come back until the next year. The ones that stayed just under the top layer of dirt for a little while longer are protected from the frost and come out when the coast is clear.

So, let’s talk about train of thought writing and the unexpected consequences.  I did not expect, as I was looking out the window and writing about my flowers, to write a painfully obvious and cliché metaphor about my own heart.  I did not expect to have to grab a napkin from the dining room table to bawl my eyes out when I realized the reason I’ve been feeling just a little bit sideways is that at some point, I am not even sure when, I seem to have lost the ability to believe that something good is going to happen to us in this adoption journey.  And I totally do not have the right to believe that, because we have only been home study ready for six weeks, and we worked so hard to get to that point.  Really, we should just be enjoying the fact that we made it through to the other side, because it was a lot of emotional hard work.  It’s also worth noting that it is a darn good thing we did not get called right away, since during the month of February I got to enjoy both the stomach flu AND legit influenza. (Note to self: stop justifying your feelings away with practicality and facts, for heaven’s sake! You have a right to be upset sometimes just because.)

I spend some time every day reading the WordPress journeys of other women like myself, women who are going through IVF, or considering using an egg donor, or pursuing adoption.   It’s important to read their stories and remind myself there are other people out there going through this too, because otherwise it is isolating to the point of suffocation to be the only one. One of these ladies recently underwent IVF, was successful, and learned she is having identical twins.  That was last week.  Probably I should have stopped reading at that point, like a total jerk who can’t be happy for someone else because her twins have their own amniotic sacs and mine didn’t. Instead, I continued following her updates and today she was seeking advice about whether she should tell her boss and her coworkers she is eight weeks pregnant, and before I knew it I was shrieking at my laptop, “No, woman, no! Why would you do that?!” Yeesh.  Never mind that when I was pregnant with E, I told everyone I encountered that I was pregnant at about 4 weeks along.  The hubs thought we should wait a while to tell people, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.  Hey, did you tell your mechanic yet?”

But then we experienced loss.  And more loss, and then nothingness.  Through all of that we had this shining little beacon who was oblivious to our pain and radiated joy through our home like Tinkerbell and her pixie dust.  It’s hard to feel despair when the embryo who did show up to the party is now a little boy full of love and light.  And I’m so incredibly grateful for him, and I think the truth is I just don’t know if lightning really can strike twice in the same spot.  Perhaps the biggest problem is that I’m just not sure I believe it can, for now. When God blesses you with what you desired most above all else, is it fair to ask for another miracle?  When you do, is it fair to expect one? 

Borrowed Genes