It's Hard

I was emailed about another placement today. Two sisters one older than I had mentioned being interested in adopting, but they are very cute little girls, so I said yes. I’m still waiting to hear about two different sisters that I was emailed about last week more in my comfort zone age-wise. While I find it near impossible to not think about them, I do a fairly good job of not getting my hopes up too high. Many times I say yes and never hear another thing. I want to be patient, to calmly wait for my baby to reach me, but it is hard. It is hard when every night I fall asleep thinking about holding my baby, learning his/her personality and little quirks, of loving him/her so wholly and totally. It’s hard when every time my phone rings at work I answer it hoping to hear “This is So-an-so from CHOR. I have a placement.” It’s hard when I dream about seeing Christmas morning through my baby’s eyes. It’s hard when I go into the extra bedroom and see the empty bed and the empty crib all made up for my baby. It’s hard when a co-worker brings me a bag of kids’ books and says, “I know there are no kids in your house now, but I thought you might like these.” It’s hard when my parents talk about the children who have left and how much they miss them and want to know how they are doing. It’s hard when I see baby pictures plastered all over Facebook. It’s hard when I go home to an empty house every night after work. It’s hard when I wake up thinking I hear a baby crying or calling my name. It’s hard when I have to move the bath toys to take a shower. It’s hard when I have been waiting for nearly 5 years and have endured so much loss in that time. It’s just really, really hard.

 

I want to be enjoying my life. After things went south with my marriage, everything got sucked into the black hole of misery and all I could do was concentrate on surviving. Not to say I was miserable, but my over-all rating of life at the time was rather low, probably the lowest it has ever been in my life. Once the initial excruciating pain subsided I was left with a dull ache and a bitterness in my life. I had survived but my wounds were deep and slow to heal. Mentally, I held onto things, to ideas that I eventually found were holding me back and not letting me truly move on. At some point, I realized just how bad things had been in my marriage before it ended and how I was free from all of that and, most importantly, I was glad to be free. Flaco stopped coming around and I stopped waiting for him to be miserable without me. Sometimes, if I let myself think about it (especially, I let myself think about the monetary issues that Flaco left me and how he now has two cars) I still want to exact my revenge. I wish I believed in karma, but I don’t know that I will get to see him get what is coming to him. If I had the money, I would fight him tooth and nail to pay his portion of the debt he walked away from simply to see justice served (and perhaps to cut off my nose to spite my face….). But, I suppose vengeance is the Lords, so I make myself stop thinking about it. Move on. As I slowly emerged from the pain, other emotions like disappointment and bitterness rushed to fill the void. I fought hard to pull away from those vitriolic emotions, trying to latch onto something good. That something good was the two kids I had living with me and the tiniest possibility that their mother wouldn’t get her act together and they could stay. As it became more evident that the children would be going home, I was again struggling with those twin demons of disappointment and bitterness. I wanted a new placement as a quick fix to squash that uprising within me. But, it’s been nearly two months and I am no closer to becoming a mother than I was last year this time. So, I started the dresser project I had planned over the summer and I’ve been thinking about painting my bedroom (I have lived in my house for 7 years now and have never painted my bedroom. Flaco and I could never agree on a color and when he left I just never got around to it). I need to stay busy. I took a bus trip to NYC with a friend this past weekend and we had a great time. We have plans to go back to see the Rockettes in December. And (drum roll please) I’m kind of seeing someone. We started talking in July while he was away working in another state. Now he is back and we finally met face-to-face. I’m not getting my hopes up and we are taking things glacier slow, but it’s a nice distraction from waiting. Yet, there is still something, a miniscule residual feeling of loss, of missing something. I don’t want to say I could never be happy without having a child, but I think there is always a tiny disquiet piece of me that knows something is missing and that something is a baby. In church on Sunday I mentioned something to the pastor’s wife about waiting for my baby to come and she responded with “Yes, your baby” gesturing in front of her stomach for a round pregnant belly. No, Pastora, that is not what I meant. That ship has sailed and has been lost at sea. Sometimes it makes me angry when she keeps insisting I will be having a biological child. It makes me angry because I have given up on it, moved on. Like letting go of a helium balloon, I let it go and watched it soar and fly away. Only, that sounds too nice and neat and not painful at all. Giving up on the thought of having a biological child ranks right up there with one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. It’s not serenely letting go of a balloon, it’s vicious and messy like cracking your ribs and tearing your own heart from your chest. It’s not something I would ever want to do again and it’s not something I think I could survive a second time. I’m not willing to see another infertility doctor and endure more testing and letting my hopes get me to think that maybe, just maybe…. Only to have reality smash my teeth in and beat me to a blood pulp. No, there is no going back on this one. Do I wish things were different? I sure as hell do, but it is what it is. I was dealt a lousy hand when it comes to fertility and that’s the only hand I get to play. There’s no sense in cursing out the dealer because it won’t change a thing. Even if I were to get married again, I would need to be very clear to my new husband that infertility is an issue and that I am not willing to travel down that wretched rabbit hole again. If, by some ironic miracle we would get pregnant, I would be over-joyed but I won’t pursue it like I did before. Besides, I hope that I will already be a mother by the time I get remarried, so we will have a child or children and could adopt more, if we so choose. I just can’t go through the whole “let’s get pregnant” thing again. It’s a broken part of me that will never be how it was before – the naiveté has worn off and the truth is harsh and unrelenting – it’s not something I can undo no matter how much I wish I could.

 

So, I keep waiting and praying that I will get the call soon. The longer I wait the more apt I am to accept almost any placement I am given – this I have learned about myself. What I hope for and what I pray for is an infant, but that is a pipe dream. I don’t know if it is because I am not directly with a children and youth county agency or if I am single, but I have a very slimmest of slim chance of getting an infant. I said yes to a 7 year old child, which is two years older than I was hoping for, but I think I feel desperate – like I will take what I can get. I guess that’s not the best attitude to have, but I know I have loved every child I have had living in my house from the 10 year old pre-teen to the 10 day old baby. So, I’m sure I can love any child that comes into my home now and becomes my son or daughter. I guess I just have to keep believing that the child who is meant to me mine will find his/her way to me at the right time and it is all in the Almighty’s Hands.