The one with all the metaphors...

I know I've alluded to the fact that we didn't just decide to adopt overnight or on a whim. I know you already knew that. But I guess I feel that writing about the process might be a teeny tiny bit helpful to someone else who--poor darlings--are in similar circumstances. But then that sounds so pompous--why would my journey or thought processes be useful as a guide to anyone else? So I'm not meaning that, necessarily. After all, this journey is about the most intensely personal I can imagine--which is why I blog about it for all the world to see. OK, not all the world, but the handful of readers I've got :)

Soon I will post an old draft post called "Waving the White Flag" which I am promising myself I will.not.edit.one.bit. I wrote it very soon after we made our final, final decision...even after we were entertaining the idea of more treatment (shudder). But for now, I'll just let you into my head a little more.

A few posts back I included the lyrics to a song...and funny enough that song is by the Mister from back in his grown-up band days. I hadn't thought about the song in a long time but one day I started singing it and when I got to that part of the lyrics they grabbed me.

I can hear the engines die, stallin'.

When you fail repeatedly at treatment, especially twice at one of the big-gun clinics, you feel as if you're in a plane, listening to the engines cut out. Panic sets in. You know there is nothing, nothing you can do. You claw at the air, desperate, but you're completely out of control.

I can see the clouds go by, fallin'.

You're in a free fall, life racing by you at a breakneck speed, so fast you can scarcely take it in. The world keeps on living but all you can see are the clouds--falling-- and perhaps the ground racing upwards towards you.

I can feel my senses fry, dissolvin'.

This line always makes me shiver. My senses were frying. I was trying so hard to live my life but I was so, so sick of the undercurrent of infertility robbing me of my natural born happiness. I am lucky. I am lucky. I have my health, I have my friends, I have a job, I have a home, I have a full belly. But I was dissolving, becoming a shadow of myself whose senses were tuned only into infertility. What smells, sights, sounds, tastes, touches was I missing as life kept happening and I was still free-falling through infertility treatments?

But I still know my way home.

My way home is parenthood. To be a parent. To help shape a little tiny human being. To nurture them through this world into an independent free-thinking person who respects humans and nature, who loves and laughs and contributes. Who makes a difference. That's my way home. Not seeing my genes passed on, not looking into my own eyes, not having a big pregnant belly. Will I miss those things? Sure. But in the end, they just had to take a backseat to finding my way home.

I do still know my way home. My way home is going to be fulfilled with a little tiny baby in Ethiopia, half a world away, who does not need rescuing--no no no!--but yet we desperately need each other. I am her way home and she is mine.