Pondering an Alternate Universe 

Posted in The Adoption Waiting Game by

Part of the struggle of infertility/adoption can be the toll it takes on a marriage. In fact, couples who suffer from infertility are three times more likely to end up divorced. The flip side of this is that couples who cling to one another through the highs and lows are amazingly strong because of it. I imagine this is true for any adversity that befalls a couple. 

The way I see it, you’ve got to be a rock solid team in order to survive the heartbreak that comes with infertility. I’m learning each day that this is is even more true with the adoption process. The uncertainty, the waiting, the hurting, all are easily capable of compromising a marriage. I’m exceptionally lucky that I just happened to be married to a man that is both strong enough to handle the unpredictability and heartache and also shares my “whatever it takes” attitude. He also happens to love me a whole bunch, and I am also rather fond of him. 

Today, I’ve been trying to keep myself busy as we wait for “The Call.”  Then I started having a movie montage of our lives running through my head, and I have to write it out of there or it will keep playing on a loop. Is this normal behavior or do most people experience montages from time to time?  Hmmm. 

Seven years of our nine year marriage has involved the struggle to build a family one way or another. From day one, we decided to go after our dreams together.  It wasn’t hard to agree on a game plan; we both wanted children above all else, and couldn’t imagine our lives without them. So while other couples were buying new cars, or traveling, or spending money on things other than the pursuit of children, we banked all our extra nickels and dimes for the next fertility treatment. When we decided my body had been through enough, we started putting whatever extra we had away for adoption.  I’m definitely not complaining; I’m grateful we have had a little extra to squirrel away a bit at a time. The Internet is full of couples trying to fund their adoptions using “Go Fund Me” or other methods of crowd sourcing, because it’s their only hope. 

I wouldn’t change a thing about our life, the good or the bad. But I can’t help but wonder what our lives would have looked like if we hadn’t been an infertile couple. I think it would be pretty cool to see our lives in an “alternate universe” like tv shows do sometimes, where the main character sees how desperately unhappy they would have been if the biggest burden they carried in real life had never existed, or if it had been someone else’s problem. The point of course, is that the main character always realizes at the end that they are so much richer in character and happier in their situation than they ever could have been in the alternate universe. I already know that’s true for the hubs and I, I just think it would be interesting to see what it would have looked like. I think we probably wouldn’t have E, and I don’t want anything to do with a world that’s missing our sweetest miracle. 

Right now though, I could definitely live without the anxiety that comes with waiting for this phone call. I really could. 

Frenzied Cleaning is the New Xanax

Posted in The Adoption Waiting Game by

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

Posted in The Adoption Waiting Game by

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.

Infertility Aprils, Chapter I, 2011: The Little Embryo That Could

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April has traditionally been a pivotal month in our infertility journey. I can’t explain why we have experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows during each of our infertility Aprils.  If I were a person who believed in numerology or put my faith in numbers as a way to determine my fate, the number four (4) would be the equivalent of an all-stakes roll of the dice in the game of procuring a baby.

April, 2011: I always prefer to start with the happy stuff first, don’t you? This month four years ago marked our first IVF cycle, and resulted in the birth of the joy of our lives, E, in December 2011. The truth is, many people don’t know how close he came to not existing at all. Even more truthfully, John and I didn’t learn until over three years later that statistically he should not be here, and the only reason he is, is because he was a particularly tenacious little embryo.

One week before my scheduled egg retrieval in mid-April, our RE (reproductive endocrinologist) looked sadly at me after looking mournfully at the ultrasound screen. Sad and mournful are not looks we wanted to see from the doctor who we considered the guardian of our hopes, dreams, and $25,000. Despite tacking on an extra week to my protocol and subjecting my body to even harsher hormones to get optimal results,the $3500 worth of drugs they had me jabbing into myself twice a day had only resulted in the development of five mature eggs. Hence her sad and mournful countenance.

The process of IVF is to stimulate the ovaries so greatly that a woman has 15-25 eggs ready to harvest by retrieval time. The RE recommended to the hubs and I that we convert this IVF cycle to an IUI cycle, and try IVF again in a couple months. In other words, she could shoot some of the hubs’ swimmers into my uterus like a sling shot and we could all pretend that maybe it worked for a couple weeks. No matter that it had been definitively decided months before, by our RE, that IUI (inter uterine insemination) would never work for us, and that the other fertility clinics were staffed by imbeciles who didn’t read our lab work properly and put us through three meaningless rounds of IUI. So said this very doctor who was now suggesting doing the same flipping thing(one of the many hundreds of reasons infertility can break you down—at times, you realize your doctor isn’t even paying attention, and it sucks.)

First off, five eggs chilling in my ovaries may not sound like much, but if a quirky little miracle occurred and some of them managed to be fertilized, this is how one finds themselves pregnant with a litter. Stories of quads, quints, sextuplets, etc. are almost always the result of an IUI. Many people believe IVFs are responsible, but it is a much more rigorously controlled procedure that is designed to result in the birth of just one baby. There are only two exceptions to this I can recall offhand, one being the Octomom, who found a shady fertility specialist that would transfer eight fertilized embryos into her womb at once. That is a giant no-no. The industry standard is to transfer two embryos max into women under the age of 41 with a history of fertility problems; recently, it has been changing to where many clinics really only want to transfer one embryo, in order to eliminate the possibility of multiples. It is considered acceptable to transfer a maximum of three embryos into a women aged 41 and older, simply because the odds of success with IVF go down incrementally after age 35, and then take a gigantic nosedive at age 41. The other IVF example in the news recently is the story of the Gardner quadruplets. The mother had two fertilized embryos transferred, perfectly ethical, and in a nearly unheard of twist, both embryos split and resulted in the birth of two sets of identical twin girls. Other than that, the finger should be pointed squarely at IUI regarding high order multiples.

As I said, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of the hub’s sperm having free reign in my uterus with five of my eggs bouncing around in there. So far none of our genetic material had demonstrated a lot of motivation, but you never knew when those guys might wake up and decide, “Hey, we should really stop being lazy and do something with our lives.” I didn’t want those sperm turning over a new leaf and living it up, like it was Spring Break for frat boys in my womb.

Also, I had just put myself through countless shots, sleepless nights, scary mood swings, a ten pound weight gain, and in the name of 8lb 6oz Baby Jesus I was going to do this IVF come hell or high water. I told the doctor we were continuing with the IVF and that was that. She sort of sighed, but respected my decision, and scheduled our egg retrieval for exactly one week later.

There are a lot of people out there who believe IVF is a godless way to have a baby. Oh how I despise those people. You can always tell who they are, too. They reek of “Church Lady” from the old days of Saturday Night Live, portrayed by Dana Carvey. With a bit of an open mind, they would see how God’s work is embedded everywhere throughout the IVF process. Like when the RE went to retrieve my eggs seven days later, and she not only extracted the five healthy follicles she had seen on the ultrasound the week before, but also retrieved an additional five that had previously not been seen on ultrasound. They had appeared and grown rapidly in the span of one week, something that is supposed to be impossible. At the end of the retrieval, we had ten healthy, mature eggs. The next day, we had ten fertilized embryos. Five days after that, we had two fresh blastocysts to transfer and five to freeze. The remaining three didn’t survive the freezing process, but overall the results were excellent. Six days after the egg retrieval, we had the fresh embryo transfer. And ten days later, my pregnancy was confirmed. That was a banner April, the gold standard of all the months in all the years, in our quest to build a family.

Last summer, an especially intrepid fertility specialist was looking at our old lab work from spring 2011, trying to see if it would provide him with any clues as to why we had experienced three failures in a row as we tried for number two. He called me to say that with the numbers he was looking at, the odds of a successful pregnancy in April of 2011 had been about 10%. Ezra truly was a tenacious little soul who fought his way here, and we should count our lucky stars that he did. The bad news of course, was that fertility labs don’t improve with time, they worsen. If our odds were 10% at age 32 in April 2011, they were exponentially worse at age 35 in June 2014.  Oddly, instead of feeling despair, I felt overwhelmingly grateful that my little creature decided to buck the statistics and show up anyway.  Even then, I knew we would find other ways to grow our family, and I felt very peaceful and hopeful about what was in store down the road.

Tomorrow I will share the exciting tale of how two teeny tiny little feline creatures rescued me from falling into despair, courtesy of the dreaded April of 2014.

Follow along with Borrowed Genes! Sign up to receive updates by email (keep scrolling down) or follow my page on Facebook, also called Borrowed Genes. 

Meeting Recap

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As the hubs and I cruised up I5, on Friday I had a sudden revelation.
“Hey, how many times have we made this drive, headed north, in our attempts to…how would you say it…”
“Build a family?
“Yeah. How many, do you suppose?”

We pondered it for a bit, mulling over the bittersweet memories that were surfacing. A lot of driving north full of hope, a LOT of times. First there were the many, many trips to Portland for the IUIs that did not work, and never could have worked.  Then the trips to the top fertility clinic in the NW for IVF, so many trips that even if we sat down and intentionally tried to count them, we still couldn’t.  Then the embryo transfers, second, third, and fourth, each time sent home with reassurances that our embryos were A++ and we should go home thinking optimistically.  The miscarriages that required us to make the trip north to resolve it, even in our grief.  The consultation last spring where we learned an egg donor was our only option for getting pregnant again.  The interviews of three more fertility clinics, then a fourth in Washington.  Next were the drives up to the adoption classes after we decided genetics didn’t matter to us but parenting did.  And finally, this long awaited drive north to meet our expectant mother.

It was a gorgeous day Friday, somewhat uncharacteristic for mid-April in Oregon.  The straight shot up the freeway offered us a crystal clear view of Mt. Hood to the east much of the way.  We held hands off and on during the drive up; we were well of what the other was feeling, and we rejoiced in our special connection where words don’t really need to be spoken in order to convey our emotions to each other.

We joked a lot on the drive about what not to say or do.  For example, the hubs best piece of advice to me was not to bum rush our expectant mother, cradle her stomach, and whisper creepily, “My baby, my baby,”  upon first meeting her.  Wise words.  My recommendation for the hubs was to go into the meeting  viewing it from the perspective of our emom,* in order to help filter out any dialogue that might make her sad or give her cause to wonder if she chose the right couple.   Questions to avoid might include, “So, you’ve placed a baby for adoption before?  How did that go?” 

When we arrived at the meeting place, our adoption coordinator was waiting for us on a bench outside.  A few minutes later, our emom arrived, and my heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest and fall to the ground at her feet.  We needn’t have worried, Carrie** proved to be very friendly, outgoing, and open about her life.  We were seated quickly at the restaurant, and there were no awkward silences or need to scramble for conversation topics.  Our chat was very natural and flowing, and we talked for an hour before ordering, simply because we were so excited to learn about each other!  Carrie is the type of person I could easily be friends with, even outside of an adoption scenario.  We share many of the same interests and hobbies.  The conversation revealed a woman with integrity, determination, goals, and courage.  The topic of adoption or even the baby itself did not really occur until the last 15 minutes of our 2 hour and 30 minute meeting, after our adoption coordinator redirected all of us back to the issue at hand.  We learned that she would love to have the hubs and I in the waiting room as soon as she went into labor, but that she did not want any company in the delivery room.  That was a bit disappointing, because I was really hoping she would invite me in to witness the birth.  I would love to be in the room and be a support for her, and I could also witness my son*** being born.  I did not have a labor experience with E, straight to emergency C-section, so to witness my second child being born would be a miraculous experience for me.  The hubs got to see the whole C-section so I think he’s good for the rest of his life regarding babies making their way into this world.  The truth is, my needs and desires around that issue are not top priority, or actually any priority.  The woman in labor calls the shots, and that is how it should be!

We also learned that her doctors believe they calculated her due date wrong and she is actually two weeks further along than they previously thought.  Also, she has a number of risk factors for a preterm birth (37-39 weeks) one of those being that after her last pregnancy the doctors told her never to get pregnant again because it would be dangerous to her body. Also, at her ultrasound this week, the doctor estimated that the baby weighed nearly five pounds, much bigger than a baby would be at 32 weeks.  So this week I’m going to pack our “go bags” and install the infant child seat in the car.  That’s probably a little hasty, but I feel like it’s a reasonable amount of paranoia for someone who gave birth to their baby three weeks early, with zero warning (that would be me.)

We are going to meet again this week, and her mother will be joining us.  She and Carrie are very close, and while she supports her daughter’s decision, it’s very important to her to meet, and to approve, the couple that will be adopting her grandson.   If circumstances were different, she really wanted another grandchild (this is Carrie’s sixth baby).  But circumstances are what they are, and as far as I’m concerned, a child can never have too many people that love them, including grandmas!  We plan to let her mother know that we have no intention of shutting her out, we will share pictures and letters and probably even make an occasional visit.  When we began exploring adoption, the idea of maintaining contact with birth parents or other biological family members seemed terrifying and I wanted no part of it.  Over the past several months I’ve learned so much about adoption, and the way it works best is when there is no “mystery” about the birth family.  Research has proven that kids who know their genetic history right off the bat are much more secure with their identity, part of which is being adopted.  That doesn’t mean co-parenting with the birth parents or staying in constant contact all the time.  It really just means that all the parties (adoptive parents, birth parents, child) are aware of each other, and the birth mother doesn’t spend her life wondering how her baby is doing.  And the baby doesn’t grow up wondering why they were placed for adoption, and having no idea how to create a genetic-based family tree in high school biology class. It’s a win-win for everyone, most of all the child.  As it should be.

The next meeting should be sometime this week, and I’m confident it will go just as well as the previous one.  Everything is moving along exactly the way it is supposed to, on track to a successful adoption.  However, the hubs and I continue to proceed with cautious optimism rather than outright excitement.  Adoption is a tricky business, one that we have absolutely no control over.  We are both just trusting that God is on the job.  When we put our trust in Him, we know that things will work out the way they are intended to, even if it doesn’t turn out the way we want.

We should know much more tomorrow, and even more after the next meeting!  Please keep checking back in, because things are going to be happening quickly and we may have changes or updates every day to report!

*emom: adoption jargon for “expectant mother,” a term considerable much more appropriate than “birth mother” until the baby is actually born.

**not her real name, changed to protect privacy

***for the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to refer to the baby on the way as my son, although this is technically not true until the baby is born and the papers are signed 24 hours later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Posted in The Adoption Waiting Game, Uncategorized by

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.