It Begins

This really all started over 11 years ago, when B and I were taking pre-wedding classes. We had this exercise where we had to go to our own separate corners with a notepad and pen and write our answers to some fairly difficult questions, then team back up and compare notes. I forget the rest of the questions - we both had the exact same answer to all of them, and they were all kind of no-brainer questions for us. But one stood out, and that was: "how would you deal with infertility?"

B's answer ran along these lines:

Get treatments. There are lots of medical treatments and we start by exploring them. All of them. Leave no procedure untried. And if they don't work, we adopt. Whatever it takes, but we will have children.

My answer was more like this:

I do not want to be one of those people whose lives are defined by their lack of fertility. Once you go down the road of trying to figure out what's wrong with you because you can't make a baby... it just doesn't stop until it consumes you. If we can't make a baby, that isn't the end of the world. And I don't want to go through infant adoption - there's so much competition for healthy babies... it's not for me. There are a lot of other things we can do with our lives, a lot of other ways we can go about leaving our mark, besides becoming biological parents. I want to be a parent, but I don't want my life to be about becoming one.

We met back up, compared notes, and laughed like 25 and 26 year old idiots at the thought that we would ever have any trouble popping out youngsters to befuddle to our hearts' content.

Fast forward eleven years, and the joke's on us, I suppose. We've had one round of IUI, and I've experienced the joy that is Clomid injections, and we've experienced the year of paying off the bills from that one go-round. Two months ago, I had just accepted a new job after three months of looking, and we were debating whether our now-recovering savings should go to another round of treatment or the down payment on our first house.

The new job was working on an aspect of a state's social services network (don't want to get more specific than that...) and I was browsing around that state's social services website when I noticed a link to that state's "waiting children." Clicky-clicky.

I have never wanted to adopt a baby. But these weren't babies, these were kids, and they need a home.

And it turns out, B had been thinking along the same lines. He was on board immediately, and B is never on board immediately. B takes most of a year to get used to big ideas, so this had been kicking around in his head, unspoken, for a long damn time.

We're buying a house this summer (when the lease on our apartment is up) and we'll be moving forward with beginning our orientation with our local adoption agency in January, so that we'll be as close to ready to get kids home as possible when we close on the house.

This blog is intended to record the process from the start. I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I'm getting myself into.