You can change over there.” The nurse pointed to a small changing room off to the side. She handed me a hospital gown and walked away.
I stepped into the room, locked the door, set the hospital gown on the chair in the corner and began to undress. As I slid my arms into the gown I got a glimpse of my body in the mirror. I paused and stared. Instead of seeing a body that was strong and able, a body that got me out of bed every morning and carried me through my day, a body which functioned in a way that allowed me to travel the world and navigate it with ease, I stared at my naked body, and the only thing I could see was brokenness.
At that moment in my life I had been on this thing we call the “infertility journey” for over two years. Allow me to fill you in. After four years of marriage to the love of my life we decided we were ready to start a family. I was 24 years old, young and healthy with no genetic history that would ever lead me to believe I would not be able to get pregnant. But once we hit the six month mark of trying to get pregnant, I had a feeling something was very wrong.
People in our lives, including my ObGyn, were quick to dismiss my fears, saying things like “Six months is not a long time,” and “No need to worry.” But any woman hoping to get pregnant who does not right away knows that those months in which we remain un-pregnant add up like some kind of freak dog year making six months feel three years at least. So two years later when I made my way to the hospital for yet another procedure and stared at my broken body in the mirror, my head knew it had only been two years but my heart and my soul were certain it had been much, much longer.
Getting back to that moment in the hospital changing room: I was there for a dye test. In those two years leading up to that moment I had had numerous procedures each one leading to another which ultimately led me to get a dye test to see if my only working fallopian tube was clear and if so, hallelujah-praise-the-Lord there was hope for a pregnancy still.
What happened over the next week would ultimately be the final nail in my infertility coffin. It seems a little harsh to use such an analogy, but the loss of my fertility was a death to me. I’ll spare you some details but in short what happened is after the dye test I went home full of hope. I had learned that I had a functioning and very clear fallopian tube, and I had been told by so many well meaning people that it was not uncommon for women to end up getting pregnant shortly after a dye test. A few days after the test, the hope I was holding so tightly began to dwindle when I found myself doubled over with a pain that made it so I could not walk on my own. My husband helped me to the car and rushed me to the emergency room. Over the next couple days I would find myself in and out of the emergency room multiple times with fever, pain, vomiting and diarrhea. While I was never hospitalized, I did end up spending two weeks at home in bed because of a horrible infection that had spread throughout my female organs.
When I finally made my way back to my ObGyn he informed me that I am part of the less than 2% of the women who have a dye test done and get an infection because of it. He also informed me that an infection of that magnitude would have most likely destroyed any chance I had at getting pregnant, placing my fertility into the coffin and nailing it shut.
I left from the doctor’s office that day crushed with the dwindling hope I had been holding onto disappearing completely. When I got home I crumbled, falling into my bed sobbing.
It’s such a strange thing to find one’s self in grief which exists in the loss of a dream. While the world around me continued to turn and flourish, I was stuck, and my dream of motherhood felt dead. But as it goes, our friend Time stepped in to help my heart heal and eventually I found my way back to hope. And this time hope took on the form of adoption.
When hope found its way back to me here is what I learned: while my dreams of pregnancy had come to a close, my dream of motherhood was still very much alive and it could be fulfilled by growing my family via adoption.
So we started down the path towards adoption and let me tell you, it was nothing I thought it would be. If you are a potential adoptive parent, I don’t want that to scare you, but I do want to share some of what I have learned that I wish I knew when I started the process. The truth is, I went into adoption with one purpose in mind: to become a mom. Three adoptions later I have learned that the fact is there is so much more to adoption than this.
After the pain of the loss of my fertility started to dull, my husband and I went in search of what we thought would be the best way for us to pursue adoption. At the time I was very much wanting a healthy infant. I anticipated the road towards adoption would be bumpy, but I also romanticized it, ignorant to the trauma from which every adoption comes from. So with a blind hope we chose a private adoption agency. When the time came for us to check the boxes identifying traits we were open to or not with our future baby we checked “no” to all major health issues or genetic differences. We also were hoping for minimal contact with the birth family in the form of cards/letters and pictures only. So when we learned about a baby girl born with a congenital heart defect, pulmonary hypertension and Down syndrome, saying “no” to adopting her made complete and total sense. On paper she was so much of what we were trying to avoid. But there was a tug on my heart to learn more about this little girl, and after three weeks of going back and forth between: “I think we should adopt her” to “There is no way we can do this,” we ultimately found ourselves saying our scariest and best “YES!” and bringing home our daughter with her broken heart, sick lungs and extra chromosome. Ultimately, we made this decision because at the end of the day she was a baby in need of a family and we were a family in need of a baby, and that seemed to be more than enough. In addition, the thing we discovered, quite quickly I might add, is that none of the things about her that seemed so terrifying on paper could even come close to the love we would feel for her and the ways in which her unique perspective on life would change our world.
As I type this she is twelve years old and the eldest of our three kids. About two years after bringing her home my husband and I chose adoption again. This time we decided to adopt through our local county. This would mean we would have a lot less control over the type of child we would bring into our home. But after learning so much about the adoption process and knowing that adoption is about more than just growing our family, we were open to the layers and nuance an adoption would bring our way, which meant we were open to all different kinds of adoption scenarios.
When our eldest daughter was three years old we brought home another daughter. She joined our family at six months old. She had no diagnosed special needs or health issues but she is a different ethnicity than my husband and I, and so she opened up a new opportunity for us to learn what it means to have a transracial family. And together we continue to navigate the trauma found by being a person of color raised by white parents, which is an unavoidable, delicate and important aspect of her story.
When our eldest daughter was five years old and our middle daughter was two, we learned about a birthmother who was pregnant with a baby boy who had a congenital heart defect and Down syndrome, and she wanted to create an adoption plan for him. We were so honored to get to be the family she chose for her son to grow up in and two months after meeting her, our son was born. Our relationship with our son’s birth mother and her extended family has taught us so much about the importance of knowing and allowing our children to also be the child of their birth mother. She’s helped us see that when it comes to adoptive and birth families it is not an either/or but rather a both/and.
Today, all these years later, I write this as a mother of three children ages twelve, nine and six. Three children born from different women's wombs. Three children who call me mom. This is an honor I do not hold lightly. And as I think back to that broken girl staring at herself in the mirror I want to gather her up in my arms and tell her, “it is going to be harder and better than you could ever prepare for. And you are going to be okay.” Because, dear friend who finds herself on this adoption journey, it is going to be harder and better than you could ever prepare for. And you are going to be okay.
