This bit is going to be difficult to write, Peeps. I want to say that it’s hard to talk about, but maybe it’s not hard to talk about so much as I’ve never really expounded on the subject before. It’s difficult because articulating it all at once seems daunting. Families are tricky things, even the best ones, and it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll begin at the beginning:
God made the world
Or so people say. To be honest, as an agnostic, while I’m not ready to discount the existance of a higher being in general, and while I’m a very big believer that there is some undercurrent out there that seems to connect an awful lot of us, I don’t really believe in God as he is described in the Christian scriptures. I lean more toward us being a bunch of really lucky atoms on a particularly fortitous rock.
Growing up Christian there is this expectation that I at least will buy some of what I heard sitting in the pews or arguing in Youth Group, but all church did was confirm to me that some people in this world are awesome people and go to church, and some are truly foul human beings… and go to church. Most of the worst damage I have seen done to people that I know were done by those in organized religion. Some of the cruelest moments I’ve seen were people using God as a reason to be horrid.
I, myself, think that the world is wonderful and cruel and mysterious and the one thing that you can guarantee is that the guy who says he can explain it to you is exactly the one who can’t. I can say with absolute certainty that I have no idea where we are before we begin or where we go, if anywhere, when we die. I know that I’ll be interested to find out and I will try and be as nice to people as I can before I go.
I offer, from that wise old tomb The Ghostbusters:
Winston: Do you believe in God?
Ray: Never met him.
How then, do I reconcile my passive non-belief with what appears to be a calling?
Now, I’m calling it a calling because that is what people call it. I, myself, have never gotten the God memo on the God stationary saying, “Hi! This is from the desk of God…”. There are people on the EL here in Chicago who apparently got that memo stating that they could be as obnoxious, loud and presumptuous as they like, but that’s irritation for another day.
On the other hand, for me things are pretty clear. I’d very, very much like to adopt. I feel (if we MUST) that I have been called to adopt. I cannot tell you why. I cannot tell you why that has always been a truth for me. I could not say at what point for me, if any, biology became irrelevant when it comes to parenting, but I can tell you that I have always, always felt this way. There was not a time when someone said “adoption” and I said, “Heeyyyy! Wait a minute! I could do that!”, rather there was never a time when my response was anything other than, “Oh, yeah. I’m doing that.”
If anything, reading the adoption stories as they are told on the gloriousness that is the World Wide Web has only made me feel like I’ve taken a correspondance course in what adoption is and firmed up my belief that there’s no deep, dark trick to getting it right. That adoption, like all parenting, is best done with as much prep and information as possible, and you’ll still get a lot of it wrong. Here is what, I believe I have understood, adoption is not:
NOT:
- The same as biological parenting
- Vastly different from biological parenting
- Simple
- Easy
- Prohibitively complex
- Entered into well when one is mistaking oneself for a saviour of some kind
IS:
- Deeply rewarding
- Different than biological parenting
- In most ways, the same as biological parenting
- To be entered into with some knowledge and forthought
- Hopeful
- Joyous
- Born in loss
- Worthwhile
It would be hard to summarize what I have learned reading the accounts of parents and families go through the process. I’ve read blogs of folks who have adopted from all sorts of different countries, adopted all sorts of age groups, through foster care, in open adoptions and closed adoptions. I have developed some sense of what I would be comfortable with and what I would not be comfortable with. One of the things I have truly learned is that lying to yourself about what you’re comfortable with is a BAD, BAD idea.
So when, during the whole ovarian reserve debacle, as I was rending my clothes and hair about my precious, precious eggs, I suddenly remembered adoption it was like one of those pictures where you have to focus on something other than the picture to see it. I was so focused in on the details of fertility and age and the blips and bumps and possibles and not possibles that I didn’t see what was screamingly obvious.
I don’t know if being adopted by me would be the best life event for any child, but I know that, selfishly, it would make me beyond happy. It makes me so happy for the parents when I see them with their new children and it makes my heart ache that maybe someday I will be able to become a mother to a waiting child. I don’t know how it would be for the child but I know that for me it would be a deep, deep blessing.
And normally I’m into luck or fortune, and not blessings.
Wallace was and remains a deep blessing. I will never regret a moment of pregnancy or motherhood of Wallace. He’s gorgeous and and the most important thing in my life. I do, however, feel that I could feel that way about another child, whether or not that child grows in my tummy.
Unfortunately, many of the adoption stories I read are heavily Christian. Following callings is a very big thing in the Christian community, and Christians are big sharers. They like the sharing, preferably with oodles of scripture. It sometimes becomes difficult to read, the heavy religifying of becoming an adoptive parent; as though God is what makes it good, rather than it’s good for its own sake.
I’ve read ”religious” gotcha stories written by people who passed terrible judgement on the societies they travelled to to get their children; I’ve read about people who thought that these children, who had no say in either their abandoment, upbringing, or adoption, should be grateful. I’ve never heard anything more rediculous in my life. It’s like, have these people ever met any children??
If I ever adopt it will be with an open heart and a completely selfish impulse, the same impulse that drove us to have our first child. To want the small hands and the loud yelling and the teensy feet in the teensy shoes. To want the worrying about them and loving over them and first day of school and first date and the sound of quiet sweet breathing over the monitor. To want THAT baby. THAT one is mine and will always be mine. Though they belong fully to themselves, any children we have will be, in my mind forever, MINE. The impulse to be a mother is gloriously selfish.
Of course, I’m not the only parent around here. As I’ve said, TT and I have done little to no talking about the results of the test and what we may do, should they be negative. There would be talks to have. Some people know they could never adopt, some people are driven to it, and some are merely fearful and/or uninterested. I don’t know where we, as a family, fall on that spectrum.
I know that if it is an option for us we could not even begin for years, and until TT sits for his citizenship test. I don’t know that his international status would prohibit international adoption, what with the police reports and other items needed. I don’t know if it’s even possible.
There are, as is the case if our next child is biological, hurdles to overcome.
But I see that little face in my dreams, the face of the baby not born yet somewhere where I am not, and I want to reach out to that child and wrap my arms around her or him, no matter what they do in response, and say “MINE”.
And ovarian reserve is a nothing.
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