I've been experiencing an interesting phenomenon...
Through the years of infertility, the gory treatments and the crazy hormonal swings, I had no problem opening up to people (fellow infertility sufferers, friends, curious bystanders, etc) about our journey with infertility.
Until...
A few months ago we decided to start looking at adoption. For some reason I was anxious to talk to anyone about it. There were a small number of people I had questions for and told, but for some reason adoption hasn't been something I have felt confident in confiding we are looking into.
Maybe it is all the uncertainty that comes with it...the lack of any sort of timeline guarantee.
Maybe its just being tired having so many people involved in my little family becoming a bigger family. (Who aren't already friends and family, ya follow?)
Or maybe it is all the negative rhetoric floating around between birth moms and adoptive moms...can't we all just be moms?
I was so worried that people would judge me. I've had some (hopefully) unintentionally harsh experiences working in nursery where moms would 'joke' about me not pretending their kid was mine, after they found out I was struggling with infertility. What? Yea....I hope this was just poor comedic prowess on their part, but it hurt my feelings and it scared me. On discussion boards there were inevitable comments from birth mothers calling adoptive mothers 'baby snatchers' and making remarks about adoptive mothers pressuring birth mothers into giving up their babies.
I'm sure there are truths and exaggerations to both sides of the story, but the idea of another woman thinking of me as someone who took her child and was now 'pretending' to be that child's mother weighed on my heart. (It's about time I stop being so caught up in what other people think of me, right? ugh, right.)
With all that flapping in the wind, I have reached my point of excitement and being truly able to invest my hopes in the adoption process as a way to add to our family.
So, I guess all that is left to do is wish us luck.
and patience...
cause we're going to need it.
But really guys...
really truly...
WE'RE SO EXCITED!
queue the never ending paperwork!
Oh my gosh... I cannot BELIEVE that someone would say something like that to you!!!!! People really say the worst things to you when you're infertile. Ironically enough I had a hard time being super open about our fertility struggle but no problem talking about adoption. That was ultimately not the way heavenly Father intended for Kate to come to our family, but I've always felt a strong personal connection to adoption. I have a lot of friends who have found such happiness through it. And fwiw, all my friends have really beautiful relationships with their kids'birth moms. One of my friends even considers her daughter's birth mom to be like a sister.
ReplyDeleteThat's amazing! We're adopting through foster care, so I'm a little bit scared about what the birth parent relationship will be...if there is one at all since the child would have been removed from their home whether they wanted it or not...I think if we went through an agency (which we might, further down the road) I'd feel a better connection with my kids birth parents, but I honestly might struggle with having a relationship with someone who neglected them...but hey, forgiveness is an amazing thing so I'll just have to wait and see...
ReplyDelete