Change in the air

OK.

So I think it might be getting time to wind down the blog.

I'm not an infertile woman pursuing fertility treatment anymore. I don't hear from people as often as I used to and I understand--it's not the same journey anymore. I miss people though, and then I obsess that I've said the wrong thing or not been supportive enough and really I need to realize that the story is different now. Maybe not as compelling. Maybe I don't speak in a language that others want to hear.

That's ok.

This place has been such a great source of strength but I just wonder sometimes if I need a break. So I'll be thinking hard about what I want to do next--keep blogging about the adoption or just fade off into the sunset. I'm not LastChanceIVF anymore after all.

Although I will always be her in part.

At any rate, before I decide I had to write this next post.

Claudia--a successful Ethiopian adopter of the most gorgeous twins by the way--left the following comment on my last post regarding why it is probably a good idea to avoid s-e-x near times of ovulation: Adoption can seem so much like 'failure' to the IF world - and this makes your baby the success baby, not the failure baby. It makes that baby the focus of what you're looking forward to, rather than the 'plan B' baby!
It's an interesting concept, I'll admit. Because the mister and I always said we'd 'have one adopt one' long before realizing we were infertile so I never thought of adoption as a second choice. Of course, back then I also thought babies and pregnancy were easy to come by and life would go according to the way I planned. I really had very little knowledge of international adoption--I have two cousins who were adopted from China and while I watched my aunt struggle through that process I really had no idea of the struggle.

At any rate, when you're immersed fully and wholeheartedly in ART and some clueless outsider mentions adoption well, you tend to cringe. You do feel like it is a second choice. And at that point, I guess that's true. If it weren't you'd already be pursuing adoption versus ART, right? So on the basis of the definition of first choice vs. second choice, for years we kept the biological baby as our first choice. We had discussed that having a biological child first, and then adopting, made the most sense--that way the adopted child would never feel they 'weren't enough' and that's why a biological baby followed. See? We were always thinking, the mister and I.

So yes, biological baby was the first choice. But it was never our only choice.

I saw the movie "Temple Grandlin" recently and her mother described her autistic but brilliant daughter as "different, but not less."

When she said those words I felt my heart and soul swell with emotion, and tears started to fall. They were not sad tears but they were tears of understanding.

Our option to parenthood is different--certainly--but it is not less.

As we traveled deeper and deeper down the road of ART for family building, as we met with more and more obstacles, more and more frustrations, more and more heartbreaks, we naturally started thinking more about adoption. In a very real sense, more as the first choice. More as the only choice.

And slowly all of the beautiful parts of adoption started to rise to the forefront of our brains and hearts.

Different, but not less.

Dare I say, different, and maybe even more?

I still struggle with feeling like a broken woman as I'm left out of countless conversations and do not have a shared identity with the fertile women who surround me.

But I am also slowly starting to see the beautiful parts of the way I will be a mother, and realize that I, too, am different.

Different, but not less.