Living the Lie

Is what I have felt I'm doing all week. I am, to be honest, having a tough time coping with a lack of control over this whole process, my upcoming big 3-0, and dumb*sses who have no sense of boundaries.

Obviously, with adoption, there is a lack of control. We had to go through about 10 social workers before finding one who was willing to even speak to our family, due to my husband's having been married previously. Which is BS. Then the SW takes the word of a million other people, all of whom may or may not have an agenda against adoption and/or your being parents, as Gospel. Ultimately, it was Doctor #2's unwillingness to work with Doctor #1 that has held up the process, to a degree more than money has.

But I was surprised to discover this week, REs also have the ability - and it seems in some cases the drive - to "play God". My H and I interviewed one this week, and were not impressed. When the RE mentioned that their goal was a healthy pregancy with one baby, I asked about twins, mentioning that there are quite a few sets of on both sides of my family. I'm not some Pollyanna in rose-colored glasses; I know that a "twin" pregnancy would have to be watched more carefully.

The RE we interviewed, however, launched into a long tirade about multiples being a selfish choice, Octomom's RE being irresponsible, and multiple births being life threatening to mother and babies. Apparently, they will cancel your cycle if they feel you've produced too many follicles unless you agree that "selective reduction" (and I hate that term; just call it "babykilling" and spare me the pretentious euphemisms). We're kind of torn because they are the best in the area, with the most flexible schedule. I look at the pictures of the recently born octuplets and feel so sad - they look so small and emaciated I don't know how they'll ever grow up healthy, and that probably is due to sharing a womb with 7 other siblings. However, babykilling a twin is insane. Since babykilling is ultimately the mother's choice, we may just give the RE lip service beforehand, get the IUI, then move forward with our twin pregnancy and get another OB-GYN stat. Should we be lucky enough, that is.

I hit the big 3-0 in a few weeks and just feel miserable about it. I really feel like I should have either found the right career or been a mother by now, if not both. Instead, I have chosen to forgo graduate school or a career change into something that's more suited to my interests, strengths, and personality, because of wanting to stay in my current career to earn the $$$ that adoption/fertility treatmments are going to cost. It's not that I dislike my current job, it's just that I'm never going to LOVE this kind of work, and that kind of sucks. I feel like myself, my personal relationships, and my coworkers get shortchanged because of this. Yet another piece of my happiness being chipped away by what a b*tch Mother Nature has been.

Last but not least, are the dumb*sses with no boundaries. Yes, I have stopped drinking coffee and alcohol. Yes, I have had a few doctor's appointments and personal days recently. NO, it is NOT your place to comment loudly on both (on one occasion within earshot of my boss), while smirking, then email me links to articles about "Adoption is International Baby Stealing", Octomom, or religious propaganda against IVF and/or launch into stories about what a pain it is to take care of children.

Number one, this is my and my husband's decision. Nobody else gets any say, although I may ask my friends or loved ones for advice or to be my ear when I vent. However, if I haven't told you outright what's going on, that means I don't want you to know so STFU. Number two, it is my right to use my time, as well as my financial and emotional resources as I see fit. But bottom line? If I were already pregnant, nobody would be acting like this. I hate being made to feel like people think I'm doing something wrong in wanting to be a mom. I'm not even on any fertility drugs yet, and I feel short tempered and moody.

I think I've just come to the conclusion that whether you're trying to become a mom through adoption, or through fertility treatments, or both, you are always going to run up against idiots who buy into the notion that "If you were supposed to be a parent, you'd already have a baby" and then decide to hold you to a much higher standard than the beer-swilling, trailer-park-dwelling welfare momma who gets knocked up with her fourth before age 25 on the first try. And unfortunately, some of these idiots are in the position of power to say yes or no to your moving forward.

Yet, tomorrow morning, I've got to get up, make the LONG trek to work, and see how well I can delude others into thinking I'm just thrilled with my "childfree" life.

Failure

After many, many tearful hours of discussion and argument, the H and I have decided to put the adoption on hold, thus delaying our children coming home. It was a very hard decision, and I'm still trying to make peace with it. Nobody's giving out adoption loans right now, we'd be idiots to tap into our 401ks at this point, and we don't have the 10K in cash sitting around that we needed to jump through the next hoop. I am sitting here with my $50 Fit Flops, Coach Bag, and purebred kitten on the desk next to me, kicking myself in the butt for not having made different choices and saved much more $$ over the years. (OK, the kittens, were worth every cent. It was that breed or nothing thanks the H's allergies. But really, did I need MAC makeup before I was old enough to buy wine with my real driver's license?!)

I am going to be 30 in May, and likely not be a mom by then, which for me is a very bitter pill to swallow. And here I am feeling sorry for myself, when the fact is that our choice means two more little kids sitting alone in an orphanage that much longer, mostly due to our selfishness and somehat fear.

We are both going back and forth (I'm back when he's forth and vice versa usually) about whether or not we are done with the reproductive endochrinologist or not. To say I have mixed feelings about this is the understatement of the century. It sounds childish, but I only want to move forward with the next level of treatment if it works (as in, yields a pregnancy that I carry to term) the first or second time. Male Factor is expensive as crap to treat, so once we go past 5 or 6 cycles, that money would have paid for an adoption.

I ended up having to fire my doctor, due to his being such an a-hole about signing off on my medical form. Still have to find a new one, and don't honestly have the mental energy to do that right now.

We are also arguing, again endlessly, on a country. H, of course, wants to adopt from the most expensive country on the planet, and I prefer a different one, where the adoption fees are about 1/3 the price. This is too long for a blog post. We are now investigating a "compromise" country, which unfortunately would mean we'd have to change adoption agencies. Boo!

So as of right now, there's still a light at the end, it's just that the tunnel's longer than we thought.

I am off to drown my sorrows in Ugly Betty reruns.

P.S. F*U to my ninth-grade sex ed teacher, who made it sound like getting pregnant was as easy as farting. And F*U to that "psychic" last year who told me I'd be a mom by 2010.

T-3 days till first homestudy meeting

Am I getting together our marriage certificate, passports, birth certs, etc?

Am I rehearsing in my head what I'll say to the SW?

Am I finishing my obnoxiously long autobio statement?

Am I doing any reading on Ethiopian culture, attachment issues, etc so that I sound like an enlightened PAP?

Am I pushing to market my newest fundraiser so that we can pay for this all?

No, no, no, no, and no.

What I am doing is looking at baby bedding online, debating the merits of decorating the beans' room in jungle animals vs turtles vs chic lime-and-chocolate retro designs.

I am so not normal.

No news...

Is not always good news. We have our first homestudy meeting next week, and I have been going back and forth between excited and stressed.

I'm stressed because:

• We're nowhere near done writing our autobiographies (about 50 pp each); mostly because the H's stupid job has been keeping him crazy hours this week.
• A million little what-ifs keep popping up in my head; this prospective adoptive parent support group I've joined is kind of a mixed blessing in this regard. This is going to be a long, hard, expensive process, with a lot of opportunity for the random fallible human being somewhere along the line to keep us from adopting based on their personal values rather than objective facts.
• I do not want to get into it here, but my medical evaluation was a less than positive experience. Not only did I get the impression that the doc was actively looking for a reason to fail me (seriously, who makes someone repeat bloodwork THREE times?! It came back all good the first two, WTF do you think subsequent tries are going to turn up?), but the doc made so many negative comments about international adoption and wives/moms working outside the home (daycare is NOT the same as an orphanage. I understand the beans will have separation anxiety till they understand we're coming back after work to get them, but come on) that I'm petrified to have the homestudy social worker speak to him. I need a new doc, and fast, as well as a good story as to why I changed at this juncture.
• Cost. OMG. Ethiopia is a very reasonably priced country, but this is all relative when adoption comes into play. We have to lay out about 7K over the next two months, which is a challenge when our home is underwater and nobody's giving loans. It's extra annoying, since AFTER the adoption is finalized, our employers will reimburse us pretty much everything. We just need to come up with the cash, now; had the credit market not collapsed this would not be an issue. I have some fundraising ideas, but especially in this economy, I am not sure how well they'll do, not to mention I feel badly hitting up friends/family/loved ones. Need to make a decision about Stella & Dot today if I want to get the cheap sign up special.
• Our beans being unhappy when they come home - missing their caretakers at the orphanage, hating our cold winters, facing racism here in the US, feeling like it's their fault that they were placed in the orphanage, etc... I could go on and on.
• The SW not liking us, and denying our homestudy.
• Who we're going to ask to be our references. I don't know how much work it is to be a reference, not to mention most of our "friends" that have kids are actually relatives who can't serve as references anyway.

I'm excited because:

• If the HS goes well... we will become parents!

PSA: What not to say to adoptive parents...

... unless you want to (best case) really hurt their feelings or (worst case) alienate them permanently. Both things I've heard said to others, and dumb sh*t that gets said to me.

• Can't you have kids naturally? Is this your business? Do I ask you about the internal workings of your crotch?


• Just relax and you'll get pregnant. Unless you are their gynecologist, you never know what goes into someone's fertility. They may have one of a million medical issues. They may be a trannsexual. They may just be a person who prefers adoption to pregnancy.


• You're just going to get pregnant right after you adopt. Yeah, unless we don't. See above. That only happens to 8% of adoptive parents anyway, so we're not holding our breath.


• Adopted kids turn out messed up. Granted. Moses, Dave Thomas, Steve Jobs - all such screwups. So unlike that sweet little Jeffrey Dahmer, who was raised by his birthparents.


• You're buying a child! Most adoption fees go to pay lawyers. Nobody calls the medical costs you paid to give birth "buying" your children. PS - offspring are not commodities.


• Adopted infants are stolen from their birthmothers. Unfortunately, this happens a SMALL percentage of the time. Adoptive parents and adoption agencies go to great lengths to avoid that happening.


• If you were meant to be parents, God would have given you a child. You now speak for God and the universe? F* you.

Special to international adoption:

• Why don't you adopt domestically? Why don't YOU adopt domestically? Whether, when, and from where is the best place to adopt, is a question every family answers differently. In our case, we found some aspects of domestic adoption to be not for us. Also, if we're going to adopt, we prefer to do so from a country where being adopted vs not may be the difference between living to adolescence and not.


• If you care so much about Ethiopia, why don't you do something to make the place better rather than just take their kids? Did we explicitly say we were doing nothing to help Ethiopia? It's not that we don't care, it's just that (a) on our planet, classy people don't brag about charitable donations; and (b) Is my name Warren Buffet? No? Then probably, any charitable donation we give that country, isn't newsworthy to anyone but one or two individuals.


• You are such a humanitarian to take that poor child in! Right. Thanks for your support. That said, adoption is not a charity project, it is a way to build a family. That means the parents are probably happier to be mom and dad to that child than the child is to be adopted. And do you have any idea how bad it must make kids feel to hear people refer to their mom and dad loving them as some great act of benevolence?


• Any comparisons to Brangelina. Do I make out with my brother and keep a vial of my husband's blood around my neck? Then I guess we're not so much like Brangelina at all. PS - adoption is tens of thousands of dollars spent, every aspect of your life examined with a microscope, and your nerves on end for a year plus. This is not something people do because it's "the in thing".

Now that you know, I trust you will not say any of the above unless you're trying to be a douchewaffle.

Before the first homestudy meeting

In sixteen short days, we meet with the social worker for our first homestudy meeting. I am both excited and nervous, and a tinge resentful.

To those of you who haven't adopted, where we are right now, means we are working through MOUNTAINS of paperwork, blood tests, 25 page theses on our thoughts on life and childrearing, and recruiting references.

Honestly? I understand that you can't just give a child to anyone, but seriously, is this amount of scrutiny necessary? For example, is a child seriously better off in an orphanage than with parents who don't attend church and bought purebred pets rather than go to an animal shelter? Because we've had several social workers refuse to consider us for a homestudy on these grounds. Do medical conditions like high cholesterol and renegade blood sugar render someone unable to be a parent? Give me a few weeks and I'll tell you what our current social worker thinks.

While I've heard so many positive things about the one we've hired, I've run into so much negativity, so many petty people who can't keep their own personal biases separate from their professional lives, that it's really freaking me out. It's like if we don't measure up to some other person's judgements, we fail and it's back to the fertility clinic. To some degree, it's like this guy gets to play God and tell us whether or not we have the right to be parents. And you know what, yeah, he doesn't know us from Adam, but if you ask anyone who actually knows us, my husband and I would be kick-ass parents. And it really gets under my skin to have someone suggest otherwise. I know we'd have a lot to learn, both about parenting and about the parenting of adopted kids. But can't that be said of everyone who becomes a parent for the first time? It's like the "adoptive parents are lesser parents", or the "if God wanted you to be parents, He'd give you a baby" bias, seep into even the adoption professionals.