My Pre-Midlife Crisis

Infertility and Adoption

Together, my husband and I are an infertile couple. Alone, each of us would have been sub-fertile. Together, we are clinically infertile. It took a while for me to process the weighty implications of infertility - from aspects of my identity as a woman, to my carefully honed image of the future of my family.

Adoption for us was not a result of or reaction to infertility, and that is a noteworthy revelation. Adoption has always been an option for us. It was something we discussed before marriage. It always seemed like simply another way of doing family. For us, adoption came about after we discovered we were infertile, but we never viewed adoption as a lesser choice. It might have been interesting to experience pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding, or to see what a child would be like who had Michael's and my DNA. But Cookie is not our second choice or our last resort.

To have gone into adopting as a means of trying to lessen the impact of infertility or viewing adoption as somehow second-best would have been a grave disservice to any child. Cookie is not our salvation from anything. She does not fill an aching void, or make up for any of our imperfections. She is not a commodity, a posession, or an acquisition.

She's our daughter.

I hope to never treat my daughter in a way that communicates to her that she is "lucky to have us", or to treat her as if the world revolves around her in a way that communicates to her that we will "never be worthy of having her". What I do hope to communicate to her is that we are blessed to be a family, and that God saw that we would be good for each other.

I am grateful that we had the time and opportunity to process the reality of infertility before adopting. I am grateful our foster care R&C worker questioned us both about it as much as she did. It is critical that adoption not be a reaction, but instead is a choice. It's not about wanting a BMW, but settling for a Kia because that's all you can afford or access.

You might read our story and come up with different conclusions. You might say that God sent Cookie into our lives, or that the Universe brought her to us, or fate, or circumstance. But that is precisely how we chose to create our family.

We chose to say "no" to fertility treatments because we knew in our hearts that if we did, that adoption would become in our hearts second-best, the least-hoped-for outcome. I never wanted to even risk taking on the mindset that somehow mother nature, or God, or the Universe had screwed me over. I never wanted to play the martyr, or roll around in my own pool of self-pity.

I am sorry that I do not know anything about Cookie's birth family except their legal and moral choices. I can tell her that J. chose to give her life. J. left the treatment center knowing she was about to be served with paperwork terminating her parental rights. It has all had to happen without her. Since she has experience loosing children in the past, my guess is that she knew she was also leaving her child. My guess is that she knows Cookie is better off. I can only hope.

There is pain in adoption somewhere. Cookie's Biomom is undoubtedly in her own personal, drug-induced hell. She's loosing her third child. I do not know if Cookie's Biodad cares. He did not care when he was molesting and beating other children, so I can only assume he does not. But I sense the pain. I have sensed it all along.

I have read acccount of other adoptive parents who write about falling in love with the "concept" of a child. I did, too. Then I fell in love in different ways with four children before Cookie came into our lives.

We chose foster care as a way of adopting for a number of reasons. First was the grave need for foster parents, and the many children that can never be reunited because of drugs, abuse/neglect, and criminal activities. Second was our extreme aversion to the competitiveness and "pick me, pick me" world of private adoptions. A small amount of surfing websites promising to serve as your personal PR firm to make you look great as a couple made us want to vomit. It seemed not only wrong at a gut level, but bordered on immoral to us. The world of fostering to adopt has its fair share of problems and challenges, but there is no competitiveness. We were renters, I am divorced, we are a bi-racial couple, and I am no cookie-baking SAHM. Still, we made good foster parents because we would love on children - and there were far more children in need of a home than there are families willing to take them. It's risky, it's heartbreaking, but it's for the best cause in the world.

People have told us we are good people for adopting - saintly even. We are far from it. We are selfish, scared, imperfect people who wanted to have a family. We were not desperate, and we did not feel like a child would "fix" something broken, but we wanted a family very much. We went about it in the best, most cost-effective, close-to-home way we knew of. At the time, I was fostering kittens for the Humane Society, and my mother jokingly said I needed to go get some human children and foster them. So, I went about educating myself. We went to 30 hours of training, and did mounds of paperwork. It was that simple.

I'm grateful my husband and I were able to openly discuss and move beyond the label of infertility before adopting. It would have been so unfair to Cookie for her to grow up feeling like we love her, but wished we could have had a biological child instead. On the contrary. Cookie did grow inside of me. While she was gestating inside J. somewhere across town or across KY, she was growing in my heart - and I didn't even know if she was a boy, or girl, or brown, or peachy-beige. I didn't even know when she would show up. All that I had was a "concept", and that "concept" was as real as it gets.

There are times when people remind us that Cookie is not our biological child - like when they ask my espresso-skinned husband if the little red-headded girl "is adopted", or when they ask him "Is that your kid?" But the feeling in my soul is real. I hope she will not feel a loss as she grows up. I hope she never feels she has to write a blog detailing the pain of knowing she was born of a drug addict and in foster care. If she does, we will talk as much as she wants to.

We might foster-to-adopt again someday, and it won't be because Cookie "wasn't enough". It's just that we've discovered that we have a whole lot of love to go around, and a life that's terrific enough that we want to share it with at least one child, and maybe more. We can't avoid acknowledging the pain that is going on elsewhere even as we celebrate on November 4th - the day of our first "baby shower". What we can do, is be certain that Cookie was not our second choice - she was God's first choice for us, and that makes her first in our book any day.

posted by No Longer In Crisis @ 10/24/2006 10:48:00 AM