Option Adoption

There are two weeks until we find out if we passed our homestudy.

Well, one of the more different things about this two week wait is that, unlike all those medicated cycles of fertility treatments, where I had symptoms to analyze and sticks to pee on, I really have NOTHING to make any indication of our success or failure. I’ve spent some time thinking about the silly things I used to obsess over, cramps, temperature charts, queasiness, invisible HPT lines, tender breasts, or what one woman coined “porn-star nipples” (my friends and I had a chuckle over that). I remember once, early on, slicing open a green pepper and finding a perfectly formed baby green pepper inside, I was convinced it was a sign (Yes, it’s ok to laugh at that one, I won’t hold it against you). I say this not to convince you of my insanity, but to indicate to the uninitiated how overwhelmingly all-encompassing trying to conceive is for those who are truly infertile. Every moment of every day, it was all I thought about, and while the signs and symptoms really were nothing more than the creations of a desperate mind, they served a purpose. They gave me hope, they sustained me through a wait during which each moment contained an eternity.

Please don’t misunderstand, I have hope that this will work… hope is all I have. Unfortunately, the events which gave me hope are going further and further into the past with each passing day, and I am having to cling to fragmented memories of a week that flew by in a flurry of interviews. There is no ambiguous HPT residing in my medicine cabinet, beckoning me to tilt it every which way under various light sources. Tomorrow morning I will wake up, and everything will be the same as it was today, that twinge I felt today in the area of my uterus was likely a cyst popping, and I know that. And so I’ve been trying to keep sane, and keep the hope alive, by doing little things like writing a story for my future child, compiling songs for an “I love you no matter what” CD (any suggestions are welcomed), and catching up on my favorite adoption blogs.

One of the treasures of blogland has to be this guy. He is a stay at home adoptive dad, struggling through a position made for women. He’s doing a great job, admits his pitfalls, seems to really respect his wife, and above all, he really adores his daughter, and he really “gets” what parenthood is all about. The entry that I linked to above is just a cute little chuckle, where he learns to understand intimately what women go through each day at home, as it becomes a part of who he is.