Wendryn Doubt

Once in a while I hit a point in time in which everything is just good. I’m in one of those times right now, and it is very nice. We have been stressed over infertility and adoption over the past six years; now we have a daughter, and she’s quite wonderful. Our sleep schedule has become predictable enough that I can start running again. I’m at work full-time now, after a couple of months of part time work, so I am catching up there. I do miss getting to be home with Katja in the afternoons, but we have weekends and evenings together as well as that odd, half-asleep time for her middle of the night feeding, so I feel like I’m still involved enough. For the moment, Xander is taking good care of her. Once he goes back to school, she will be with a very dear friend, her honorary grandma, half time for childcare. I think Katja will be very happy in that environment.

I took Nyx running yesterday morning. We only did a mile and I walked a bit of it, but it was very pleasant. She has a harness specifically for when she’s working. She is not allowed to mess around while wearing it. I use it when we’re running or going for walks with Katja. When we run, she just settles into her funny gait that adapts to my short legs and doesn’t pull or try to check out much of anything. I’m not sure how true that would be during the day with all the neighborhood dogs out, but at 5:30 in the morning she does beautifully.

The endorphins help me a lot, too. If I can’t exercise for whatever reason, it is difficult for me to not end up feeling a little unhappy. When I have the time and energy to exercise, the world seems like a much better place. After two and a half months of not running, getting back to that steady push is good for me both physically and mentally.

There are still things to worry about, mostly money, and things we need to figure out how to do. It isn’t that life has suddenly become perfect. I am just being constantly reminded that there are good things that considerably outweigh the worrisome bits of life, and I am trying to enjoy everything as much as possible.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am content, as I doubt I will ever manage that. I have several projects going, including learning Russian, working on a somewhat serious piece of writing, and reading a challenging (well, challenging for me, anyway) book about mathematics. I am enjoying re-learning Raffi songs and folk songs my mother used to sing to me so I can sing them to Katja. I don’t, however, feel unhappily driven. I don’t feel like there is any constant irritation in my life. I like what we have and I am happy.

It’s a good place to be.

For once, my IndieInk writing challenge will be nonfiction.

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

Six years ago, we planned to have a baby. Just one.

We knew we were in trouble when a fertility specialist said, with barely concealed glee, “You two are impressively infertile!”

Second opinion: the only kind of treatment we were willing to use (due to hormonal issues and money limitations – the other option was $16,000 per cycle for a 60% chance of success, and those were not odds we were willing to play) had a 5% chance over three cycles. The doctor said, if he were in our place, he would not do it.

We didn’t. We worked on accepting that we would not have a child.

Several months later, I watched my husband interact with a child we’ve known for years, and I realized that I wanted to see him with his own child. I mentioned adoption and he said he’d been thinking about it but did not want to push me.

We were rejected, with no explanation, by the first agency. We found another. We weren’t completely comfortable, but they seemed eager and had good reviews.

We went to several match meetings that did not feel right or work out for one reason or another.

We became increasingly uncomfortable with the lawyer and agency, but were already in pretty deep, so we decided to play out this hand and see where it took us.

We met a family we liked. They liked us, too. We figured out what worked. I made food for them every time I went to visit; we became friends, of sorts. It is an odd relationship and not well defined, but we knew enough to trust each other.

A baby was born, emergency C-section, time spent in the NICU. Paperwork and confusion followed. Two weeks later we could finally come home.

We planned to do what so many people do so easily, just have a baby. It seemed like such a simple task, something natural in the deepest sense of the word. We have a beautiful baby girl from a life we had not planned, and six years after we started this journey, an entirely new life has opened up. We have more people involved than we expected and we have a lot to learn, but we love this little person completely.

This is not the life we had planned, the timing we expected, or the place we thought we’d be, but I find myself deliriously happy when I am holding our daughter. Sleep deprivation has something to do with it, but not as much as you might think.

Accepting this path was not easy, but it was a very good thing in the long run.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Britania challenged me with “‘We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.’ – Joseph Campbell” and I challenged iampisspot with “‘Achievement brings its own anticlimax.’ – Maya Angelou”

On October 21, 2011, our daughter, Katja, was born. She had a bit of a hard time for the first five days, since she needed time in the NICU, but she’s fine and healthy now. I am deeply happy that our adoption journey is almost at an end and that we have such an amazing, beautiful little girl in our lives.

Here she is:

This is a picture of her while she was still hooked up to the machines and such; she looks much more like a baby and less like a cyborg now.

We’ll be setting up a private, password protected blog to write about her. If you’d like the link and password, please email me.

Another step in the adoption process was completed last week. I am starting to believe more that this could actually happen.

Infertility and everything we went through during that process made me very leery of getting excited about things that might not happen. Every month, I hoped that I was pregnant. Every month, I wasn’t. Every time it ended up hurting, even though on some level I came to expect it. We went through the testing and the appointments and, eventually, the IUI, hoping again every month that something would go right this time. It never did, and we ended up being told that we are “impressively infertile” and that the doctor could not ethically do another intra-uterine insemination (IUI). He suggested in vitro fertilization, despite the fact that we had said we did not want that and, as we found out later, that we were not good candidates.

Another doctor, more tests, and we were told we had next to no chance with IUIs. The doctor was willing to do it, but he gave us the numbers and said that if it were a choice he had to make, he would not do it.

We spent years hoping every month. We spent years having that shown to be a ridiculous hope every month. I stopped believing much, and getting excited about something that was not definite became something that I could not do.

I am afraid of getting hurt that much again.

Adoption is not definite. I know that this has a high likelihood of going well. I know that we are doing everything we can to make it work, and it looks promising. I, however, am still afraid to hope too much. I remember how much the failed hope hurt. I want to be excited, but I am holding myself back.

This step helps a little bit. I am beginning to hope. We are starting to put together a registry, which, for me, is quite difficult. It means that I can see this adoption as a real enough possibility to actually plan for it, at least on some level. We are moving furniture and figuring out where things will need to go to if another person ends up living with us. We are talking about looking for another car to accommodate both the dog and the child at the same time; our current car is fine, but Nyx takes up the entire back seat.

I do not think I will completely believe it until all of the paperwork has been signed and all we have to do is get through the six months before the adoption is finalized. Until then, it would be very easy for this to fall apart, and I am afraid. I should not be – in Magic 8 Ball parlance, all signs point to yes – but infertility taught me not to hope, not to let myself open up that far. I am in the situation of planning for something I do not quite believe in but desperately want to have happen.

It is a very odd state of being.

We have been talking a lot about openness about and in adoption. I have been somewhat surprised at people I know who think that it is all right to not tell a child that he or she is adopted. That is the basic part of openness about adoption. We believe that lying to a child is wrong, especially about something this basic. We each have an adopted parent, and both of them knew from the very beginning that they were adopted. It was not a big deal. It was part of life. It certainly was not anything to be embarrassed or upset about.

Some of our friends have been somewhat surprised about our approach to telling the child that he or she is adopted as early as we are planning (baby books, for instance, so the concept is there from the beginning). I do not want their story to be a surprise to them at any point in their lives.

If everything goes smoothly, we will be adopting a child who does not look like us. That will raise questions; that is not something that is easily ignored. I have heard about an adoptee who was a light-skinned African American adopted into an Italian family who was convinced until he was a teenager that he was just a slightly darker-skinned Italian. He was quite upset to discover he was adopted.

I do not want to raise a child without opening up the discussion and letting them ask. In the second King Fu Panda movie, the panda asks his father (a duck) why he never told the panda that he was adopted. The father’s response was, “You never asked!” Communication has to be open. It has to be all right for the child to ask anything and not feel uncomfortable, and it is our job to make sure that the the openings are there. Adoption will not be a taboo subject; it will be discussed as easily as food, work, school, and any other common subject.

In terms of meeting with the biological family, there are pros and cons. If we make that agreement, we will hold by it, of course. It can cause some emotional challenges, probably more for me than for the child (I cannot speak for Xander), but I think it is important. If a child knows that there is another family out there related to him or her, it is quite possible that the other family will be romanticized. I know when I was little, if I got angry with my parents, I would wish I had another family. How much stronger could that wish be if you actually knew there were people out there related to you? If the child has the opportunity to meet their biological relatives somewhat regularly, that romanticization could be limited. Also, seeing biological relatives may help with self-identification; it is good to see people who look like you. My older brother and younger sister are both built differently than I am, but I am clearly a combination of my mother and my father. I liked knowing I have my dad’s shoulders, for instance, and my mom’s hips. I think it might help the child grow up with a more comfortable sense of self if he or she knows that they look like someone.

I want adoption, the concept of more than one family, to be comfortable. I do not want the child to feel ashamed or unhappy. I have a lot to learn about a different culture so I can understand how everything fits together for the child, but at the same time, the child will be raised as our child, as part of our culture. I would like the child to feel comfortable with both cultures and to be able to find a path that suits them. I do not expect that path to be easy, necessarily, but I want the child be completely sure of our love and support.

This is going to be an interesting road we wander down…

I’m feeling selfish.

If/when we end up with a child, I will want to write about that experience. I don’t, however, want to write about it here. This is my space.

I am not a mommy blogger. I don’t have any issues with mommy bloggers; I think they fill an important niche, and in a lot of ways help people feel like what they are going through is a little less lonely. That particular niche can create a very important community.

I don’t want this little corner of the internet to be part of it. This blog was created because I needed to sort through a lot of things that were going on in my life at the time. I had left an incredibly toxic seven-year-long relationship. I was redefining myself. I was house hunting, working, trying to find my balance again, and learning that a lot of people I thought were friends had decided that I was not an acceptable human being because of what the other person had been saying. I used words then, as I do now, to help me find my way through life and to understand it better. I suppose it is also useful for understanding myself better. I still need this space to make sense of a very strange world. I will have a place to write about being a parent, but it will be private, not associated with this.

I do not expect many people to read my rambles. I’m sure that if I became part of the mommy blogging community I could have more readers and make more connections, but that isn’t what I’m doing here. I don’t particularly care how many people read this. I certainly enjoy seeing hits on my statistics, but I’m not shattered if they don’t come. This is the space I use to figure things out.

I have been limiting what I say here lately. Adoption is a frustrating process, and much of what goes on, I can’t talk about, either because of privacy issues or because it would not be sensible for one reason or another. I have, therefore, been ignoring the blog for the most part. I simply can’t sort anything out here. Despite having very few regular readers, it is a very public place and I am very easy to find.

One thing I have been thinking about, though, is the question of privacy in adoption. I have read several bloggers who say that they haven’t told anyone about the biological family of their child because it isn’t their story to tell. I completely understand not telling perfect strangers, but not telling family seems odd. We are going to make sure that the child (if this works) knows from the very beginning that he or she is adopted and was picked out special. The “how you came to be” story will include the biological family. There won’t be any surprises. If there were information that we wanted to keep from the child, I could understand it; for instance, if you didn’t want your mother in law to tell your child that their biological parent was in prison, then perhaps you would hold that piece of information back so you can broach the subject at the appropriate time. We are lucky enough to not have that issue. It would also depend on your relationship with your family, I’m sure. I’m not very worried about it. We’re not giving anyone else information that will surprise or upset the child, because the child will have all of the available information from very early on.

I have also been wrestling with other things, like the possibility of raising a child of a different race. Raising a child to be strong, independent, and curious, and how that would be different depending on whether you are talking about a boy or a girl. Reading about the impressively insensitive questions people get from strangers and trying to figure out how to answer them. Thinking about nature versus nurture and wondering what will come of that.

This is the first time in the five years that we have been trying to have a child, one way or another, that I have felt like it might actually be possible. We might actually be parents sometime soon.

Oh, and I’ve discovered that nesting is most definitely not hormonal. I have been cleaning and organizing and painting and trying to make the house perfect. It won’t end up being perfect, of course, but at least it will not be quite as cluttered. I was not expecting that, but it is rather amusing and good for the house.

Now that the blog hosting has been shifted, I’ll be taking part in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge again. I do enjoy that, and, if you are interested, please stop by!

I have had enough varied experiences in my life that I generally know how to approach situations and handle them fairly well. I don’t claim to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I do reasonably well. Being a prospective adoptive parent in what (if nothing goes wrong in the meantime) will be an open adoption, however, is completely beyond my ken. I don’t have a clue what I should or shouldn’t be doing, but I know that I really, deeply do not want to screw this up.

Part of the problem is that we don’t live close to the other people involved. I can’t just swing by and say hello. I can text, which helps, and I do go down regularly, but if an appointment gets scheduled at the last minute, I can’t necessarily make it there.

I’ve been reading a lot about open adoption, and what I’ve read is that sometimes adoptive parents make promises they don’t end up keeping. We’re making promises and we will keep them. We are still not completely comfortable with open adoption, but we will do what we agree to do. I’m not willing to raise our child to adulthood, have him or her decide to track down his or her biological connections, and end up hating us for not keeping a promise we made before he or she was born. It isn’t fair to anyone to set that problem in motion. The promises we make, we keep, just as in other areas of our lives.

I enjoy cooking. People tend to like eating what I cook. I’m trying to use that as a bridge here. I bring bread or food when I go to visit. It’s the only way I can really express all of the mixed up feelings going on. I can provide this small thing, at least. I can bring good food, and in doing so perhaps help them be more comfortable with what must be a terrible decision to have to make. We will take good care of this child if we are able to bring her or him home.

I feel like I am trying to prove something, but I’m not sure what. I have not had the chance to just sit down and talk with the other people involved without having someone basically chaperoning the discussion. I am hoping to take Nyx for a visit soon, and if I can do that we’ll have time to sit and relax with no time pressure. I think that might help. It is hard to know what to say, though, or how the other people are feeling about us. We are doing everything we can to make this work, as are they, but I feel disconnected. I don’t know if what we are doing is helping the other people or not, making it easier or harder.

There is no guidebook for any of this. We’re trying to find our way in uncharted territory. We have another few months before any of this stabilizes into reality, and in the meantime it would be best if we could avoid upsetting anyone. When I have asked for help or guidance from the person who has experience in this area, the response has been, “Well, every adoption is different.” That is it. That is all of the help we are getting from that quarter. Not terribly useful.

I am a little bit of a control freak with no control over the biggest things going on in my life right now. I’m dealing with this by running, which keeps my stress level down, and working on the house. If this all falls apart, at least the house will be clean. I am trying to not get too wrapped up in anything. I am not very good at letting everything just flow by, but I am attempting to learn.

I suppose I’ll just have to keep feeling my way blindly through a confusing world and hope I don’t do anything exceptionally stupid.

I like planning things. I’m reasonably good at it. I stay on top of what needs to be done, make lists to make sure I don’t miss anything, keep from leaving loose ends, and try to cover all the bases. It’s comforting to me to have lists. It gives me some structure; when things need to be done, they will be done, because they have been crossed off the list.

What happens when I have no control over events which will have a huge impact on my life?

We are waiting for the possibility of a baby. We have done everything we can from our end. At this point, we’re just waiting. If we get to the end of December without a match, we will reassess. Some part of me would love to make a room for the baby, set up books and toys and clothes, and start making sure we have a place that works when a baby comes home with us. Unfortunately, it isn’t a “when”. It’s an “if”. I know that, for my peace of mind, I can’t set up a nursery right now. It would be built on hope, not reality, and if it didn’t end up working in the end it would be very difficult to have to take everything down. I know this may not work, so not setting up a room is a protection of sorts. It keeps me from getting too emotionally invested when we haven’t even been matched with a biological family.

I can’t plan for this. I can’t make it work. I can’t fix anything or make it more likely. I am in limbo.

There’s another piece of this, too. We’re planning to move out of this town eventually, but the timeframe might be pushed up. It has nothing to do with me or my decisions. I support the idea, and I’m happy with it, but at the same time it is, again, something I can’t control, despite it being a life-altering change.

I, the one who likes making sure everything is lined up, can’t plan for anything over the next few years with any certainty at all.

I can adapt when plans change. That’s life, and I have become accustomed to dealing with change. I’m not always graceful about it, but generally I handle plan changes cheerfully and just shift as needed.

I’ve never really been without plans altogether.

Right now, I do not feel like I can reliably plan anything more than about a month away. Maybe a biological family will show up and be due almost immediately. I don’t know. I can’t predict that. I can budget. I can make sure that everything at home and at work runs as smoothly as possible. I have my own limited little area that is not completely without form or focus. If I look further than a month out, though, I end up lost and afraid to plan much of anything because the maybes are much too big.

I am learning to sit back and let the world go by. I am trying to accept the fact that I have no control. I am learning to run (not fast, but at least I’m doing it) and that is helping, because I am simply putting one foot in front of the other. I do not have to plan anything but my route, and that is simple. Once that is done, I just take one more step until I turn around, then one more step until I get home. The most important thing in flying is the next thing. I suppose I am learning to apply that to the rest of my life, though it is rather difficult for me.

Perhaps I will eventually learn to be happy with not planning too many things. I rather doubt it, as I have liked planning much of my life, but I don’t know. For the moment, I am working on accepting the present, enjoying life, getting enough sleep, making sure the animals are happy, eating good food, making sure we stay on budget, and not really worrying about the rest of it. Sometimes that’s all I can do.

I haven’t been writing much of anything lately other than Indie Ink Writing Challenges. I have been enjoying those, and I’ll keep participating. I thought, perhaps, that I should write something else once in a while as well, so I’m going to try to get back to posting twice a week, even if it is only snippets of things.

I’m not very good at waiting. The adoption process is going well, as far as we can tell. The home study is being reviewed and should be completed soon. It’s nice to have that done. Now, though, the wait begins. We have no idea how long we will have to wait for a match. We’re a little hard to match in a couple of ways. We are not religious, which is one mark against us. We also don’t want extensive contact with the birth family. We’re comfortable sending letters and pictures as often as they’d like, but we’re not interested in having the birth family directly involved in the child’s life. In this age of completely open adoptions becoming the norm, that is not a particularly politically correct stance to take. On the other hand, when I go to sites that list people thinking about giving up their baby for adoption, a lot of them say they want letters and pictures and don’t mention visits. I’m sure that someone will come along eventually that matches up with us. For the moment, we wait, and waiting is not something I have ever been very good at. I suppose it is good practice, though.

Overall, life is pretty good. We’re stable, have enough income, and we’re both basically healthy. I know that’s more than many people have in these bad economic times. There are days when I wish we had enough to relax about money, but we make enough to cover bills and go out once in a while, which is good. I still budget everything, and someday I’d like to not have to worry about that, but as long as nothing catastrophic happens, we’re fine. I have to remind myself of how lucky we are when I get frustrated at having been on a very, very tight budget for years. It’s okay to be frustrated, of course, but a tight budget means that we have enough, and that’s a very good thing. I have to turn it around and look at the fact that, for the first time in a few years, we can get some of the luxuries. Not a lot, but some, and that’s really nice. I get to buy new work clothes soon, which will be especially good since the ones I have are starting to fall apart. Someday soon we will have a stand mixer, which we’ve been talking about since we got involved. It’s one of the few things neither one of us had in our kitchens. We took a day off and went to see movies and eat out, which is very unusual for us, and it was a very nice day. There are a lot of good things going on in our life, even if sometimes I forget. I only have one job. I work forty hours a week instead of the seventy that drained me for two years. We have good friends and interesting jobs. We get to go to two weddings this year of people who are very dear to us.

I think I’ll have to come back and read this the next time I get into a funk. It’s important to remember the good things.

We’re starting to plan our yearly BBQ. I love this tradition. We started it the year we bought the house, and every year since we have had an Inauguration of the Grill. Xander makes excellent burgers, we provide beer, buns, and anything to go on the burgers, and everything else is a potluck. There are people we don’t get to see often who show up for this like clockwork, so we get to see them at least once a year. There are always new people, too, and somehow they always manage to fit in with the people who have been coming regularly. We have musicians, dancers, fencers, work friends, and a variety of other people. One of the neat things about having intelligent and interesting friends is that they can almost always find something to talk about with other intelligent, interesting people. I love hearing conversations ranging from childrearing to physics to card tricks. A lot of work goes into making the party go well, but it is absolutely worth it. I love seeing the interactions, feeding people good food, and getting to reconnect with people I don’t see nearly often enough. It makes me happy on many different levels, and I’m looking forward to it this year.

I’m getting my brain back on track. I try to be a relatively positive person, but the past few years have been a long, hard slog. The death of my grandmother knocked me back in some ways to the death of my brother, which was wrapped up in the infertility grief, which was also surrounded by working too much and a lot of stress. I just have to work on remembering the good things and focusing on what we are working towards rather than looking back for too long.

I’m taking a few deep breaths, looking around for a good thing to think about, and moving on. The only way in life is forward, whatever else happens.

Sometimes the words just come. Sometimes they don’t. Today is one of the latter days.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption, of course. People keep saying that it will all be worth it in the end. I hope so. The process is not pleasant, to say the least. That isn’t helping my state of mind. The worst is almost over, though. I am feeling more often that everyone involved in the process is advocating for someone else, and that nowhere in this are our needs really being noted. We want a child who does not have fetal alcohol syndrome and who was not drug exposed. If we were capable of conceiving, neither one of those would have been an issue. I don’t want them to be an issue now, but the feeling I get is that we should cut some slack in that area. What if the biological mother didn’t know she was pregnant while she was drinking? We’re not passing a moral judgement on drinking. All we’re saying is that we don’t want to deal with that issue, because we wouldn’t have to if the child were genetically ours.

I’ve been thinking about Daniel, too. I still miss him a lot. Baseball season starts again in a few months, and, while I am very much looking forward to that, it is a little bittersweet because it is one of the things we both loved. Our team was the feeder team for his team, so we even saw the same players over time.

It’s a confused, emotionally messy kind of day. I’m not in a bad mood, or a sad mood, just kind of grey. I’m home sick today, which probably has something to do with it, and by tomorrow I should be a little more positive in my outlook. For the moment, though, I’ll spend the day on the couch, drinking broth and watching Netflix, and that will be good.