Well THIS day of this year came a little too fast...

Last year I had an adoption mental health breakdown. Tomorrow is my one year anniversary of that mental break. I wrote this post the day after: http://at-the-watershed.blogspot.com/2009/12/here-is-where-i-confess-lot-of-crappy.html

I keep looking at my birthday (coming up on Saturday) out of the corner of my mind's eye. Twisting and turning it but keeping it at a distance.

I'm so thankful for how quickly the year flew by. That seemingly endless time between my 33rd birthday and being matched with Ariam is a distant memory. The rest of the year from March 1 - current day flashed by.

I'm thankful the pain and longing is far behind me.
But not so thankful to be standing at the edge of my 34th birthday.

I don't have a lot of time to face it, consider it, and come up with something poetic. But I think there is value in considering where to go from here given the information I received last year. Without stopping and evaluating from time to time I can see how life might just take wings and fly by now that Ariam is home.

So. Last year I found out that J and I together are "infertile." Separately possibly not. But together definitively so. And I can't tell you how insulting and irritating I find it when I hear "oh but now that you've adopted you'll definitely get pregnant." Sure, that may happen to some people. But it is not as if there is a magic correspondance between the two.

If we want to get pregnant we have to pay for it. And it is easily as expensive as adopting another child.
I'm not sure what we are going to do. I don't feel any panic at all about it. (Thank God!)
But I do realize that time continues to tick by and that my next birthday will be here before I know it. I don't think we'd try any fertility treatments after I'm 35 or 36.

So what to do? How do you make these decisions? Have any of you tried IVF after adopting?

I can honestly say that I would happily complete our family with another adopted child. It isn't about the child I'm raising. I think for me it is about the experience of pregnancy. It is something I've always wanted. It is something a woman's body is made for. I feel...incomplete? Maybe I won't always feel that way, and I don't feel like I'd be incomplete never raising a bio child. But right now I still have daydreams about that moment of seeing a positive pregnancy test. Of cravings. Of the big annoucement. I have daydreams about holding a teeny tiny newborn.

Sigh. I am plain old too tired to think about this very much or very often. Which may mean I have my answer. Who in her right mind being as tired as I am would enter into invasive, time consuming, exhausting fertility treatment? For now the answer is obvious because we don't have the money. But I think it's something that needs to be settled and either attempted or grieved by this time next year.

The End. No tears. :)
No panic. :)

And now we return to our previously scheduled Christmas glee and yuletide cheer.
This Sunday WE light the Advent candle up front at church. I get a little giddy thinking about it.

~A

I really wish I had a brownie right now - but this post is not about brownies

I'm laying around my sister's apartment waiting for her to finish her shift so I can pounce on the phone and ask her to bring back some brownie mix. In the meantime thought I'd pay some attention to my blog.

I am pretty sure I left you all hanging since I never did report back on the big doctor's visit. Have you felt like that was a real cliffhanger?

It was surprisingly fun. As fun as those things can be. Got the ultrasound and had those weird little vibrating shocks (like tiny pulses) in the ovary area for the rest of the day. Is that normal? Nothing extreme just zippy.

And the good news was that things weren't looking weird. No polyps or fibroids or chains of cysts dancing Greek wedding dances around in there. Little well behaving follicles just hanging around in early cycle mode.

Saw a new doctor. Like her. Operating word here being HER. I just don't get the male ob/gyn thing. I have tried now. Twice. Ew. I really question what kind of man chooses that specialty. yick. I can never look a male ob/gyn in the eye.

I told her that evil man doctor who called on my birthday week and told us not to come back and to go to a specialist had hurt my feelings and I didn't like him. She was properly sympathetic and kind and willing to let me set forth my new treatment plan which will involve her treating my side of the infertility issues while coding my insurance forms as amenhorea (sp?) or whatever words she wants to use to denote anything other than fertility treatment since that could not possibly be covered.

No. I mean of course not. It is totally ELECTIVE to have children. Our society depends on each person basically being able to produce a human replacement in order to continue moving forward (ok, a little extreme but you get my point) but God forbid we need a bit of help doing so and suddenly it's like we are asking the insurance company to give us a brazilian butt tuck or something.

Hrmph.

Anyway, she and I were all "FSH levels" this and "hysteroscopy" that and it was really nice to finally be speaking the right language. Why do they lock you out of this club for so long with stupid platitudes about trying for a year first. Yeah, meanwhile I am trying myself right into advanced maternal age! Honestly if we had gotten to the bottom of all of this before we even started "trying" I would have never gone to the crazy edge of crazyville with all of my ugly crying and confusion.

Our current plan for anyone still interested in this side of the discussion is that we have a consultation with a nice fertility center located off the shores of the United States where prices are much more reasonable and a good friend has had great success. And the beach is involved. And I like the beach. Going to talk to them by phone (actually the consulting fertility specialist (RE) is named Juliet Skinner. AND the clinic is located on an island. LOST anyone?)

So "Juliet" will tell us what she recommends. For free she will tell us this! The local RE here wants to charge us $250 to tell us what she recommends. I really think good things come from those who go to islands for their answers.

Then we will follow instructions on this end of things. And THEN hopefully we will get baby from Ethiopia. And THEN at some point we will hopefully be able to afford to visit Juliet in person.

I realize it is a lot. In one year. It is ambitious. And I don't know that it will happen so don't hold me to it. But it gives me something to do with myself as I wait for our referral. A goal - to understand my fertility options inside and out and have a plan mapped out for later if it is needed.

I guess I want to end this post like this. No matter when and where and how I talk about fertility it is not more important to me than our adoption. I dreamt of my small Ethiopian for a long time. (Well, sometimes she was small and Asian before we chose a country... and sometimes she was a he...but that is besides the point.)

We want to adopt. We can't wait to adopt. We are honored to adopt.

AND we want to experience conception. And delivery. And a teeny weeny newborn who carries a crazy bag of our potentially bizarre gene combinations.

I don't think it is wrong and I don't feel concerned about talking about fertility on an adoption blog. So you'll continue to get some ovary talk here along with the "where the H is our referral???" discussion.

It is what it is. All I know is that since I started blogging about it all and reading books and taking charge of our options and refusing to consider 33 or 34 as "old" and started getting proactive about trying to raise some money I have felt a million times better.

I have not had an ugly cry since the event-which-shall-remain-nameless. And that was almost 3 weeks ago!

~A

Father Reluctance

What can I say? I have written this post three times in three different ways.

There is no way to talk about J and his years of "father reluctance" without sharing too much information that is not mine to share.

I want to wrap up my last post which I realize I left on a bit of a cliffhanger.

So I'll just say that this whole process has been hard on J, who entered our marriage almost 11 years ago saying that he would NEVER have kids. Now it is ironic that to have children, which he is still very nervous about, it requires him to a. divulge every bit of his personal, medical, financial, and professional information to a social worker (homestudy) b. join me at US government offices around the city c. pay lots and lots of money d. join me at expensive doctor's appointments and e. provide samples to fertility specialists

Ironic isn't it? Poor man.

But he is a very good husband and I know he joins me in all of this because he loves me. And he trusts that he will be able to love a child. But this whole thing is still a huge stretch for him.

I wonder sometimes if God is testing us to strengthen our resolve. To make it that much easier to love and adore a little someone who was fought for so hard.

So to wrap up the last post. We decided to continue to pursue the adoption. And we are currently #1 on the waiting list. So it WILL happen at some point.

I think it was very easy for J to consider postponing the adoption while we pursue fertility treatment because he has a much harder time loving the idea of our future child. Do the rest of you have similar experiences with your husbands? I have sought a lot of advice from others and I've come to the realization that J, and men in general, have a harder time attaching to the idea of a child whose face they have never seen. He is in agreement with the adoption. But his heart has yet to fall in love.

I am not sure what we will do about the fertility problems. But after a lot of discussion, and of course ugly crying on my part, we agreed to work on it this year. Some of you have recommended books to read which I plan to look into. I have found some interesting websites and blogs. We'll see a fertility specialist. We'll explore our options. I wish we were rich and could just freeze up some eggs for future use! But that is not our reality so we will see what can be done and make a decision sooner rather than later.

J has come a long long way. And I don't blame him for needing this time to come around to fatherhood. I appreciate that we've been able to spend a lot of time together. We have traveled all over the world. We hiked the Samaria Gorge. Went swimming with whale sharks in the Yucatan. Lived in Thailand and drove our little scooter to watch the sunset on the beach every night. We explored temples in Cambodia and pigged out on pizza in Italy. We listened to a Christmas concert in a tiny chapel in Oxford. And we have celebrated the 4th of July on the Capitol mall 6 times! I will never regret the time we have spent together - just the two of us.

But for everything a season and we are entering a new season of life.
Our conclusion is that we don't have a plan A or plan B. We are just trying to make a family.

~A

Here is where I confess a lot of crappy fertility stuff and ask that you be sensitive in the comments

Held in emotions. I'm sure everyone has them. The older I've gotten the less acceptable it has become to: get teary eyed when I'm being confronted with a mistake, yell at my friends or sister when I'm angry or hurt, stamp my foot and roll my eyes when I'm not getting enough attention (I actually did that in the middle of a 7th grade performance by the way), or put my head down on my arm on the desk and sob.

The adoption books would say that I have learned to self-regulate. To not lose control and let it all go over every bump in the road.

But yesterday, wow, yesterday proved what holding it in for too long can do.

All I had to do was write an email back to our church's worship leader telling her no thank you, I don't want to do a reading at the Christmas Eve service. That's it. One sentence max.

Instead I found myself writing that I did not enjoy 2009, I would not AT ALL like to read aloud at the church service or engage in any way, that I have a ban on all things Christmas at the current moment and that unless she wants a sobbing mess at the front of the church terrifying all of the pretty children in their Christmas dresses I should be kept far far at the back. I skipped baby dedication last Sunday. Historically my favorite event at any church worldover. That should give you some idea of where I'm at with church events that involve kids and celebrating.

Have I mentioned that I really don't know her all that well?
But I dumped all of those pent up emotions all over her and then cried huge ugly tears all over the keyboard as I hit send. Very very ugly tears. Not Demi Moore in Ghost pretty tears that just slide one at a time.

The rest of the afternoon, as I sat at my desk (again, thank God for working from home), I half worked and half cried. Ok, well I half worked and I all out cried. Several, SEPARATE, huge ugly cries as I wrote other emails to some of you dumping all of the upset from this last week into those messages. Then a friend, a very good friend but one I haven't talked to in a long time, called me in response to a question I asked her and since I didn't recognize the number I answered the phone (of course pulled together in case it was for work.) The second I found out it wasn't a work call I lost it - crying, hiccuping, the whole works. Wow. Don't try that on a touch screen cell phone. The screen gets very very wet and slippery.

Several people said to me yesterday that I should just blog it out. Yesterday I couldn't. And I am torn about putting words like sp-rm here on my blog just in case gross freaky people end up here looking for s-x talk or something.

But here goes nothing. I am going to get creative with the dash symbol so fill in the blanks.

Last week - Tuesday morning.
The call telling us there had been a mistake and we don't have a baby waiting for us right now.
Bad day. Sad day. But sort of to be expected on the rollercoaster of adoption.

Last week - Wednesday morning.
My ob/gyn called.

Back Story - You see, something I don't think I have mentioned much here is that we have been trying to get pregnant. For almost a year. (AAI allows this - most agencies don't fyi.) When we started trying and I found out I had PCOS really soon into the process, we also decided to adopt. I'm not a girl to wait around and find out if I'm fertile or not. I have always known I wanted to adopt and all of the signs were pointing to it after I visted AHOPE last year in Ethiopia.

Throughout this "trying to get pregnant" situation I have been on some drugs, I have had some ultrasounds, I have taken some basal body temps, blah blah blah. Nothing too in depth but sort of escalating testing of different parts and fluids and whatnot.

It has not been overly concerning since BABY GIRL IS WAITING in Ethiopia (in theory.) And we are young! ish. And healthy! ish. So I refused to get worried. And to be fair, we both agree that timing is not ideal and it would be better to be pregnant next year. So we "tried" but did not stress out.

On Wednesday the ob/gyn called with Jeremy's sem-n analysis which we finally had done about a month ago after reading an article about how type 1 diabetes can decrease male fertility by quite a large percentage. (There is no definitive data but the studies that have been done don't look good.)

He had bad news. News that no matter how realistic I've tried to be I really had never considered. He also said that there was nothing more he could do for us. Which sounded really...final. He said that we need to see a specialist. We need IVF with ICSE. Yeah, that's right. We don't just need NORMAL IVF, we need a special, extra expensive, EXTRA procedure too. I have never actually been over in that IVF camp to begin with - spending all that money when you don't have a guarantee of anything. But let me tell you here - when a doctor says to you that getting pregnant any other way would be a miracle you sort of sit up and listen and really assess how badly you want to be pregnant!

So I blithely informed him "well, you see, we are adopting and probably getting a referral in 2010 so that's ok, we'll just revisit this issue in a year or so."

To which he very sternly informed me "actually, I see you are turning 33 on Friday of next week and I hate to tell you this but your fertility peaked at 27 and really hits a decline in a hurry at 33. When/if you go to a reproductive specialist they will tell you that you should have tried to resolve this by 32. Your eggs aren't getting younger. At the very least you should freeze some. You might have a 30-50% chance at successful IVF this year but they won't tell you the same in 2 years from now!" (Ok, I didn't not relay that word for word but you get the idea.)

I did some online research and he is right. While my ovul-tion problems are not insurmountable and J's fertility results are not all bad - together we make a wrong. And that wrong will be harder and harder to fix starting on my birthday tomorrow. Tick tock tick tock I can actually hear the biological clock. Mine has become a deranged cuckoo clock.

Whew - BTW I am doing so so well writing this. I could not have written it to save my life yesterday.

That is the crux of the story. Minus the two days I spent not speaking to J because he hinted that we should halt the adoption and go after the fertility stuff full force. Minus the enormous and emotionally draining conversation we finally had about it all. Minus all of the research and thinking and praying and crying. Minus the final conclusion we came to.

But that is all I will blog today. Because I really am doing a little better and taking deep breaths. And for Cindy I will take a walk and sing a little. And for Lisa I will consider Barbados. And for Jill I WILL wear the ergo you sent all weekend - possibly with a doll inside. And for Mimi I may take a Christmas card photo of myself wearing a snuggie and holding a giant chunk of chocolate that I've been working on for a week (ok, I'm on the 2nd or 3rd now) in one hand with a baby carrier on my back and my laptop under my arm. I cannot think of a more appropriate card to express what the last 6 months of 2009 have been like.

~A