Category Archives: The Adoption Waiting Game

Frenzied Cleaning is the New Xanax

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This morning when I arose, my sweet husband asked me how I wanted to spend the day. Perhaps AgFest with the whole family? Or maybe a nice lunch out just the two of us, if we could round up one of the grandmas to watch E (never a problem). I thought this over and told him what I really wanted to do. “Oh, yeah?” he said, a little too eagerly. Only my husband would think nookie is on the table on one of the most anxious days of our lives.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to clean this house. Top to bottom, until it’s all shiny and sparkly. That’s what I’m going to do today.” The hubs briefly looked at me like I was fit for the loony-bin, but I guarantee that man knew exactly the crazy that set up shop in my brain today. We’ve been together a long time, married almost nine years, and we can read each others’ body language and predict each others’ next move with sometimes extraordinarily freaky accuracy. It’s a marvelous gift to be able to share that with your spouse; I’m sure many of you can relate. It’s like having your personal radio tuned to the same station as your spouse.

I cleaned our home with fervor today, because the only thing worse than receiving soul-crushing news, is receiving soul-crushing news when your house is a giant mess.

It’s kind of like when you feel really sick but you still have to go to work, so you take extra care to wear your favorite, most flattering clothes, blow your hair all the way dry and style it just so, and put your makeup on like you mean it. Psychologically, it does seem to make you feel a little better if you have a bad cold or similar. I’ll let you know how “the clean house theory” works, should I need to find out for myself tomorrow.

IMG_0433

Testing out the “House Cleaning Theory” of stress management.

Tomorrow we are going to receive a phone call telling us that our sweet expectant mother is going through with this adoption, or we’re going to receive a call telling us that she was unable to convey to her husband how important this is to her, and so the adoption will not be going through. Whatever decision that call brings, I will either celebrate or cry for hours, but I will be experiencing those emotions in a freshly cleaned house. The little things matter my friends! Some people think my ritual of cleaning, during or leading up to an extremely stressful situation, is a gosh-darn weird way to cope with the stress. I disagree. I think it’s a healthy way to deal with stress. Plus I get a shimmering clean house out of the deal. Seriously, if the alternative is drinking the stress away or going on a very expensive therapy shopping trip, I say house cleaning is a pretty risk-free choice.

In addition to our home being so clean you could eat off the bathtub, it also has the added benefit of keeping my hands busy.

Be prepared to have your mind blown with awesomeness. I discovered something today, so you probably want to write this down somewhere; in moments of stress and anxiety, the best thing anyone can do to work through it is to keep those hands busy. I’m pretty confident I am the first one to have that realization, ever, in the history of mankind.

My impromptu Spring Cleaning 2015 was exactly what I needed. It kept me from spending the entire day dwelling on the fact that I am less than 24 hours away from one of the most important decisions of my life. A decision I have no say or influence over, whatsoever.

Can I just say how much I hate the fact that major life decisions are being made for me and I’m not allowed to even chime in just a little? Of course I see this is the expectant mother’s decision, and I have no place interjecting my opinion. But my adoption coordinator would not even allow me to contact my expectant mother and she wasn’t very nice about it. I wanted to let her know I would support either choice, and she was a good mom regardless. Our coordinator metaphorically gag-ordered me from talking to Carrie (our emom) until after the weekend had passed. I was rather displeased; I don’t like being told what to do in those situations, especially when every fiber of my being is whispering, “Reach out. Show your support. Take away any guilty feelings she might be experiencing.” I have plenty to say about how that conversation with the coordinator went down, but I’ll save that for another post.

I generally pride myself on having a pretty solid instinct for how things will work out, but this one has me totally stymied. I’m sure it’s because I’m much too emotional about the situation and my wants and desires are clogging up my ability to even have any instinct right now. And that’s okay. If ever there were a situation I have zero control over, this is it. Trying to influence the outcome of this situation is possibly the most fruitless thing I could ever do with my time and energy.

I really do believe God is in the details and will compel the expectant parents to do what will be in the best interest of the baby. If He reveals the baby is better off not being adopted, I will accept that gracefully. That doesn’t mean I won’t cry or mourn or feel moments of despair, because I will. But most importantly, I will believe that things happen the way they are meant to.

Sidenote: God, I will most likely be super pissed at you for a period of time tomorrow if my dreams are dashed. I may blame it on you, temporarily. Thanks for being such a good sport and sticking with me, even when I accuse you of putting me on this earth solely for the purpose of robbing me of my happiness.

Oh, another odd quirk to this tale is that the due date is totally up in the air. Our coordinator said June 11; the expectant mother said it is actually two weeks earlier than that, and the baby registries I found online (created by someone other than the expectant parents) say the baby is due in the beginning of May. So, step one is the couple decides to proceed with adoption. Step two is to find out when we should really expect this baby.

Adoption Purgatory

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It would be a lot more fun to only write about the good stuff.

I set out to show what an honest journey through infertility and adoption looks like, and it’s important to share the all the bumps and manholes along the way. We already knew the path from infertility to parenthood wasn’t a straight line, and we’re finding that out about adoption, too.

We waited Monday for a call that never came. The call that confirmed that yes, after meeting us, we were still the family she wanted for her baby. The call that would make everything official, set up a birth plan, etc.

Our adoption coordinator called Carrie, the expectant mother, but didn’t receive a call back. All week. So the hubs and I experienced a hellacious four days wondering what we did wrong, if we did something wrong, and basically second guessing everything we believed to be true. Our agency is small, and only has one adoption coordinator, and she was unable to follow up with our concerns this week because she was with a different expectant mother who was in labor for two days. Then she had to complete the placement, the paperwork, and so forth, so she was truly slammed and unable to find out why we had been left hanging. That still left the issue at hand, which was that the hubs and I were left with no feedback, nor resolution, about this adoption that, last we heard, was taking place. So, I did what I do; I put my Sherlock Holmes cap on and started prowling around on Google. It’s a good idea to be prepared to deal with the information you set out to find, and I thought I was, but of course I wasn’t. What I eventually found were details that made it pretty clear that the expectant mother and father were preparing for their new baby, not preparing for an adoption. And the date they were expecting this bundle was at the beginning of May, not mid-June. At that moment, I felt like someone stuck a serrated knife right in my heart and started twisting it slowly around in circles.

But the problem with being hopeful adoptive parents is that our feelings are a distant, distant second to whatever the birth parents are feeling. We are constantly reminded of this by the books we are told to read and the classes we are made to attend. Whatever a hopeful adoptive parent is feeling, it is nothing compared to what the expectant parent is suffering, and the mindset that it creates is that we are guilty of the crime of grieving when things don’t work out because we don’t have the right. There is even less empathy for those of us who snoop around on the internet to find out the truth.

I’m not proud of the fact that I was essentially invading the privacy of the expectant parents to learn the facts, but I’m glad I found what I did, because it did prompt our coordinator to get involved and find out what the heck was happening. And here it is: our expectant mother is committed to this adoption. That’s what she wants. And she genuinely wants us to be the family that adopts her baby. She made up her mind about this adoption some time ago, and knows that it is the best thing for her, her other children, and most importantly, this baby. She is at peace with her decision. We also learned that she didn’t have anything to do with the stuff that ended up on the internet, that was done “on her behalf” and without her knowledge.

But.

The birth father has changed his mind and wants her to keep and raise the baby. Which, as we established above, is not what she wants. She loves this baby very much and that is what has motivated her decision to place for adoption. I know her reasons, but I will not write them here out of respect for her privacy.

I couldn’t feel worse for Carrie. She is trying to do a selfless, wonderful thing for her baby and has no support. She’s as stuck as stuck can be. She asked the agency for the weekend to work this out with the birth father and get back to them on Monday. I guess we will see how it plays out. If for some reason we don’t hear anything Monday, that will be it for us, and we will have to move on.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

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Thirteen hours from now we will be meeting the woman who is carrying the baby that will be our son. Let’s see if I can round up some appropriate emoticons to express my feelings in this very moment:

😳😱🙍😬😅

Ah, there they are. 

I feel very protective of our expectant mother. Haven’t even met her, but I do just the same. When she meets us tomorrow, she’s not looking at an adoption book; she’s looking at the two people she is trusting to raise this baby. Face to face. So, it’s pretty important we present ourselves as the trustworthy, ethical people that we are. That shouldn’t be a problem, right?  But you know how when you’re nervous, exceptionally nervous, you occasionally say stupid things? I’m hoping tomorrow doesn’t become an event that can be included in the “occasionally” part of that sentence. 

As I alluded to earlier this week, it’s hard to know how to gauge your excitement. For example, if I tell her how hopelessly grateful we are that she is responsible for allowing us to grow our family, will that scare her?  If I play it cool so she doesn’t see how frightened I am that she may change her mind, will that come across as distant and uninterested?  The answer to both questions is a pretty hardy yes, I would say. There is a medium in there somewhere, and that’s where I want to be. I plan to do what I always have, which is just be myself. That usually is the best course of action. Usually. Myself is not so terrible. Usually. 

Fifteen hours from now, maybe things will seem real. So far, they do not. But I suspect that after we are given the opportunity to chat with the expectant mother for a couple hours tomorrow, the landscape will look quite different.  We will see her, we will see the baby growing inside her, and we will get to know the woman who made our dreams come true. Things are getting real.  

How to Navigate Around Borrowed Genes

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Hi friends!  

A few of you have asked how to know when a new post is up, especially as we get down to the exciting events ahead that will be here before we know it. I have NOT been posting on my personal Facebook page, because I wanted to give people who were truly interested in this journey an opportunity to follow along of their own free will, without me clogging their news feeds. Basically that means you need to be following the blog one way or another to get updates from my Borrowed Genes Facebook page or via email.   A couple friends had not heard we were chosen to adopt, and were a bit irritated that they heard the news two weeks later. And I was over here all protesting, “But, the blog!  The blog.” 

1) If you are viewing the site from a computer/laptop, there should be a very large widget in the top right of the screen that allows you to enter your email address to be notified when a new post is up. For some reason, that box does not appear if you are using a tablet or a smartphone. This has been frustrating to correct, but the good people at WordPress are trying to troubleshoot where that glitch is. In the meantime, computer!

2) Follow my website Facebook page, also called Borrowed Genes. When I publish a new post, it will show up there and then appear in your news feed so you can click on it if you choose. 

3) Comments: there is a place for you to leave comments all the way down at the end of the post. Please do, I enjoy reading them and it makes it a more interactive experience for all of us. All the way down at the bottom you also have the choice of liking the post, or even sharing it on social media if I was especially profound that day. I am occasionally profound; mostly I’m prolost. 

Time is winding down and anticipation is trending up!  My forecast for the next few days: interesting with a chance of exhilaration. 

Peace be with you, dear readers. Thanks for your continued support. 

Look down here ⬇️ for where to comment, like or share. Keep scrolling…you made it! 

Excited? It’s Complicated.

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Tomorrow marks two weeks since we learned we had been chosen to adopt.  The time since we heard those blessed words has been marked with enormous excitement tinged with guarded enthusiasm.  As with any adoption, there is always the possibility that the expectant mother may decide she wants to parent after all, after giving birth to the baby.  Although we have been told she is very committed to her adoption plan, I still have reserved a big ol’ chunk of my heart just in case. I will let it out of heart jail after she has made her decision and signed the papers.  The old me would have been shouting the news from the rooftops and moving forward emotionally sans hesitation, but experience has taught me to proceed with caution. I wish that wasn’t the way it was, but it is only temporary. Once I am free to rejoice, I plan to do so unabashedly!

We get to meet the expectant parents this week!  I am looking forward to the moment I get to meet them, but I am petrified with fear as well.  It will definitely be something to see this brave woman pregnant with the baby we have prayed for since we started infertility journey part deux.  Back then I could not have imagined that my first encounter with my future child would take place just a few short weeks before they were due to enter the world, growing comfortably in another woman’s body. I would not ever have considered that a negative, I just don’t think I would have thought of it at all. The fact that this is where we have circled around to now feels very natural and exactly the way it was meant to be.

Nonetheless, when you ask me if I’m excited, don’t do a double take and grimace when I hesitate before finally saying, “I think so.” I realize that is a strange answer, but on the other hand, it’s an honest answer, and I am nothing if not honest.
 

 

 

The Best Kind of Radio Silence

Posted in The Adoption Waiting Game, Uncategorized by

We have some news to share, friends.

People have reached out to ask why I haven’t updated the blog after our profile was shared with the expectant mother. After all, it’s been like ten days!

This is the reason.

SHE CHOSE US.

She chose our family.

She chose us to adopt her baby boy, due at the beginning of June.

I have started eight different posts to share this news since we got the call last Wednesday. Interestingly, I seem to lack a writing style that doesn’t lean heavily towards the smart-ass department.  With this kind of amazing, life-changing news, I was blocked, writer style.

So that’s all I’ve got, because I’m actually tongue tied, talking style.  Yup, me.  More updates to follow once I learn how to write/speak again!

Painted by my mother for this very occasion.

Painted by my mother after hearing the news.

www.borrowedgenes.com