IVF VS Adoption, making the decision

Here starts the flurry of posts where I try to go back to the very beginning and get us all caught up.  So, here is my experience in deciding how to go about becoming a mom.

I have PCOS.  If you haven't heard of that, it's a very common issue where instead of your body filling one hormone bucket to mature one egg every month, instead your body tries to fill several buckets so a single egg never really matures and thus doesn't get released and start the next round of hormones in your monthly cycle.  The primary symptom is a lack of or very erratic periods.  From day 1, I would go about 3 months between periods, then 6 months, then maybe 2 months, then maybe another 9 months.

So ever since I was a teenager, my brain made the connection that no period = no ovulation = no pregnancy.

For the next 20 years, I convinced myself that when it was time to start a family, I would go the adoption route.  It was far more altruistic.  My theory was that there are already children out there who need parents, why should I spend my time, money, and emotions going through the fertility processes when those same resources can provide for someone who already exists and needs them?  Sure, when I find my partner, we won't prevent pregnancy and see if we get lucky, but really, I was planning to adopt.

When my husband and I first started dating, I made it clear to him early on that if having his own genetic offspring was important to him, I was not the woman to fall in love with.  I assumed I could not provide that and would not be willing to go through the rigamarole of trying.  He has adoption in his family and made the decision that while it would be great if we get lucky, he wanted to be with me more than he wanted to continue his bloodline.

So fast forward to 4 years into our marriage and deciding it was time to start our family.  We started looking into adoption.  We met with one of the biggest adoption lawyers in Seattle (he went to law school with my dad) to go over what the various options were.  And the more we learned about it, the more disheartened we became.

The government agencies have tons of kids who need homes.  But they push so hard for fostering vs adoption that it makes adoption almost impossible.  We just don't have the emotional strength to bond with a child only to have it taken from us a year later and returned to a birth parent.

Private adoptions basically consist of birth mothers shopping for potential parents.  As potential parents, we become a product in a catalog and we have to market ourselves to try and get chosen.  We can try to find the birth mother ourselves or hire an adoption agency to do the selling for us.  I read articles about potential parents being so desperate to find a birth mother that they would leave a business card with a pregnant waitress to let her know they wanted the baby if she was considering adoption.  WTF???

And in the state of Washington, an adoption can not be legally finalized with a judges signature on the paperwork until 48 hours after the birth of the baby.  So we could easily go all the way through a pregnancy convinced that we would be getting a baby, only to have the mother change her mind 2 days after the baby was born and we would be shit outta luck.

And yet, we decided to go with adoption.  We narrowed it down to 2 agencies and started filling out the paperwork.  And I started dragging my heels.  Every time I went to fill in more the paperwork, I was filled with dread.  Dread of the whole judging process.

Every question on the form was a reason to not consider us as parents.  We're not a Christian household.  I have a history of mental illness (depression issues, no longer an issue due to sleep apnea surgery but yes, mental illness is on my health record).  We don't bring in much money and would need assistance financing the adoption.  With all of these strikes against us, how would we ever get considered by someone to give us their baby?  Like applying for a job, an employer limits their list of potential candidates by throwing out the obvious NO people first and then really evaluate the small list of people who were left.  We would be tossed out in that first round and never actually get to the interview process.

So then I talked to my husband and said ok, I'm in my mid 30's.  If I have a chance to get pregnant, we're coming up on the end of that chance.  Maybe we should do a little more medical investigating before we completely give up on that.  He said that's what he wanted to do all along but because he knew I didn't want to do that, he didn't want to pressure me by letting me know he felt that way.

ARGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!  I love my husband, but this is an example of one of the traits that drives me nuts!  He's considerate the point of lying by omission sometimes.  So I yelled at him a little bit for not telling me how he really felt and we made a doctors appointment.

**K just read this and disagrees with my version of events.  He says that we talked about it several times and that when he let me know his preferences, I basically blew him off.  This is entirely possible.  He probably did mention it and I probably did blow him off.  But I still stand by my assertion that he didn't really look me in the eyes and tell me point blank that he wanted to at least try some other options before we went to adoption.