Sunday, 07 June 2009

• My Unexpected Family Created Overnight

  
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  It's been a long standing joke in my family that at my wedding shower I would get a cake saying "I'm never getting married!" and at my baby shower I would get a cake saying "I'll never have a baby!" I was wrong on the wedding thing - I married my husband three years ago and all teasing from my family aside, he is the very best man on the planet to be my partner.
  
  In fact, I love my husband so much that I even agreed to consider my personal ban of fertility treatments (for me, I don't really care what you do with your body) to potentially have a baby with him. After a year of shaky health, surgery, and being finally diagnosed, we had a gynaecologist lay out a specific plan for us for getting pregnant. After we finished discussing the various steps necessary for us to get pregnant and stay pregnant, the doctor eyed us both up and said "So should I call in those prescriptions for you?" My husband didn't hesitate for a moment before he said no. Neither of us were comfortable with the intrusive measures required for us to get pregnant and we wanted to give some consideration to all our options before we came to a decision. This was the end of October, 2008.
  
  November 3rd, we unexpectedly became parents through a family emergency. A family member called me around noon, we left St Louis around five that evening, and arrived home with our daughters (at that point age 2.5 and 11 months) around three the following morning. Our first day as a family we slept in, voted for the president, and spent more money at Target than I could have ever expected. Kids require a lot of things and we didn't have any of it. Luckily my parents had had a toddler bed and crib in their basement, so we did have beds for the girls but that was literally it. Their biological mom sent some clothes and toys but no diapers, bottles, binkies, etc. We didn't even have a high chair or utensils for our daughters.
  
  Suddenly that decision to hold off on trying to get pregnant and all the complications we had seemed to make sense. If we had been pregnant or already been parents, it would have been a lot harder for us to take on two little girls. Miraculously we pulled together childcare so I could finish off that semester at school, my husband's work was incredibly understanding about letting him have time off so we could all adjust, and we basically spent those first weeks holding our breath. Once the biological mom agreed to allow us to adopt the girls, we felt like a weight had been lifted.
  
  We let our breath go too soon. We hadn't really been prepared for becoming parents through adoption so we were unaware of the financial burden that would accompany adopting, not to mention all the time and paperwork and interviews and homestudies and meetings with lawyers and guardian ad litems and getting consent forms and ohmystars the stress. This vague panic that rests completely on your shoulders as you parent children that biologically and legally do not belong to you, this cautious optimism as you fall in love with children that you could still potentially lose.
  
  It's impossible to not love these girls. They have brought in more love, light and laughter to our home then we could have ever imagined. Yet we are still in the midst of an ongoing adoption, literally a battle to keep our daughters and maintain our family. Every time we get hopeful another bit of the floors drops out from under us and we're back at a stage of fear, clinging to our girls and praying that we get to be the ones who watch them grow up.
  
  The irony is not lost on me, that we didn't want to persue treatment to get us pregnant because it felt so invasive yet here we are, telling our story to lawyers and caseworkers, opening our home for investigation, getting fingerprinted and undergoing physicals, answering very personal questions about our life and finances and plans for the future. I don't mean to scare anyone off adoption - it's just a lot more than we had anticipated, mainly because we hadn't planned on taking this road to family building for another couple years at the earliest.
  
  We didn't have time to figure out what we wanted for our children or the ways we wanted to raise them although this has not caused as many issues as one might expect. Since we could basically agree that we didn't want them to be the kids throwing fits in public places and we did want them to be intelligent, honest, loyal, loving, accepting adults, we've just kind of moved forward with our lives. We model the behavior we expect and we have gotten incredibly lucky that our daughters have been responsive to our personal parenting style. It's not been without it's bumps (night terrors, incredible fear of men, hair pulling in frustration) but we've managed to smooth out basically all of them.
  
  The thing that overwhelmes me on a daily basis is that eight months ago, I wasn't certain I wanted children. I was so uncertain that I refused to undergo medical treatment even though we had been told in no uncertain terms that if we did achieve another pregnancy, we would likely have another miscarriage. Yet here I am now, here we are now, standing together and fighting like mad to keep our family intact. We weren't certain we wanted children but now we're single mindedly focused on keeping our daughters, these two precious wonderful little girls that have moved my heart in such a way that I know I could never go back to life without them. I wasn't certain I would be a good mom and now I live in fear of the day I may potentially wake up and not hear my eighteen month old calling out "Moooooom! Where AAAAARRRREEE you?!" from her crib.
  
  I didn't have to birth them to love them so much. The mother bear level of protectiveness has come in entirely on it's own. The fact that my face lights up at their laughter and that I spent hours in the ER with my baby, holding her on my chest and staring at her - those emotions are not dictated by whether or not I grew my daughters in my own body. Being their Mommy is so far beyond the act of birthing them that I can't even begin to explain the complete shift I have undergone.
  
  Adoption (and parenthood in general) is not for the faint of heart. It is complicated and messy and difficult. It takes up a lot of time and money and has the potential to take you places emotionally that you never expected to be. But every day that I get to be their mom is another day that I feel blessed and honored to be in their lives. In the end, I think that's what being a parent is all about.
  
  What are your thoughts?

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