Intersections

Race
Adoption
Infertility
Parenting

The main reason for my month-long blog absence is that I'm trying to figure out where to speak from the intersections.

Take adoption and infertility, for example. I'm doing things backwards, adopting before infertility treatments. There's no social pattern for doing so. There's a lot of positive stuff focused on "moving past infertility" into adoption. There's also a lot of negative stuff focused on how the framing of adoption as a second choice hurts and commodifies adoptees. By switching the order of the choices, and talking about it, am I already situated inside a noble frame, or a villainous frame? It depends on the reader, of course. I'm a very independent person, but I'm also somewhat affected by my projections of what other people might think about me. If I wasn't, I'd be a robot.

So I say to myself, "if I talk about infertility treatments, does that mean that other people will think that I'm not satisfied with Sunny because he's adopted, and when I have a "REAL" child, I'd ignore Sunny? Will they think that Sunny will be hurt?" I don't think that's the case. Of course, Sunny was adopted as an older child and he's already very familiar with the concept of a blended family -- foster, adopted, bio -- all living together.

I don't feel like a hero or a villain. I do feel guilty in one area... the best choice for Sunny would probably be to adopt another child around his age or slightly older. He loves playing with other kids so much. But he also gets along well with younger kids, and I think he'd still be happier as an older brother than an only child. Neither Guy nor myself can face entering the process again for the short-term future. It was so grueling. In comparison, infertility treatment is a walk in the park. It's had its low points... about three weeks ago, very low indeed. But it just doesn't shake and batter me the way that waiting to matched with Sunny did. Besides, we're already in a semi-agonizing waiting period for BB. That goes under "Parenting"... if I do get lucky soon, and BB comes to live with us, we'll be raising two children under the age of two at the same time. I think we're up for it, but realistically, it would be pretty challenging for a while.

I don't blog much about my infertility treatments. It's too personal. I'm OK talking about some very deep emotions on this blog, but talking about my body just feels weird. I probably have a fair number of readers who know a lot about infertility already, though! I will say, I'm staying on a very hormone-light road. In fact, I left my first RE because they kept on ramping the injectables up.

Also, I've probably internalized a lot of negative stereotypes about women dealing with infertility. We're supposed to be selfish, narcissistic and hypersensitive. I should try to explore this more, because those stereotypes are based on nasty misogynist stuff. But whenever I start, I bump into the fact that "infertility solidarity" can have disturbing consequences.

Here's one example. I hold a heretical position in infertility circles... I'm against anonymous donation of sperm and eggs, because I believe children have a right to their genetic heritage, and medical and state institutions should not be allowed to deny children that right. I think anonymous egg and sperm donation should be a topic held open for debate. In infertility communities, it's not. I've run across posts where mothers (who are anonymous, of course, like me) say very frankly that they're not even going to tell their children about the egg or sperm donation. I keep my mouth shut about my belief, although I've tried to hint at it in gentle ways. I wish I was braver about it, but I just don't have the energy for a full-scale fight on that front.

Here's another example where I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Someone on one board told a stupid racist Asian joke. I didn't even say anything about it initially. Yes, I'm a race blogger and I ignored an Asian joke, I've done it before and I'll do it again, because Asian jokes are EVERYWHERE and I can't invest my time in complaining about all of them. Someone else did object, very mildly, and then the defense came up... "well, we're infertile, so as a member of an oppressed group it's OK to blow off steam by making this joke..." At that point, I had to pop in... "AHEM so there aren't any infertile Asian women? Your argument denies my existence and is highly offensive!" At which point someone else who claimed to be Asian then claimed not to be offended (these cowardly excusers make it so hard for the rest of us) , then I rolled up my sleeves and it snowballed from there.

The idea that infertility communities are "safe spaces" is pretty much a joke for me. They're more like minefields. It also bothers me that negative coping is often encouraged by these communities, mainly, the constant accounts of freaking out and collapsing in psychic agony when a friend tells you they're pregnant. Call me a heartless bitch, but I find this very disturbing, and infantilizing, and I don't think it should be encouraged with choruses of "me too!" and "it's OK to feel that way!" In what other areas of life is this acceptable? If you lose your legs in an accident, is it OK for you to freak out whenever you see someone walking? If your mother dies, is it OK to feel constant bitter envy that your husband's mother is still living? Expressing pain, yes; collapsing and blaming other people, no. I guess this goes back to my hatred of the word "triggering". Even when we're discussing clinical PTSD, the person suffering PTSD ideally has a goal of working through PTSD. The shellshocked soldier wants to get to the point where they can just wince a little when they hear a car backfiring... not throw themselves on the ground, or demand that all cars stop backfiring. I think these women would advance farther and ultimately experience less suffering if they treated themselves with a communal mixture of sympathy AND honesty .

Then, I think, am I being a hypocrite... support for me, but not for thee? Ahh, it's so complicated. Maybe I really am a heartless bitch. I'm currently taking a break from infertility AND adoption communities.

I'm in a privileged position to be able to do so. Parenting, on the other hand, isn't something I can ever take a break from anymore. And I'm having a difficult time blogging about how parenting intersects with race. Again, there's no frame that fits my stories, and I also feel sort of inadequate. I don't have many teaching moments with Sunny about race. He overhears adult family conversations about race, but he doesn't fully understand, and in fact he gets a bit bored. He's just not interested in hearing complicated stuff about institutional racism and I'm not interested in teaching him anything before he's really ready for it.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is that the concept of "black/African-American" is especially difficult for him to comprehend. He has a sense that people with his medium skin tone are like him, but light-skinned black people (like the across-the-street neighbor kid) and dark-skinned black people (like the next-door neighbors) are different. And in a child's literal imagination, of course they're different!

I want him to grow into a positive sense of black solidarity... that is, the idea that black people 1) face a set of common problems 2) should support each other in facing those problems 3) while realizing their common strengths 4) but not minimizing their diversity. This isn't an easy lesson. Colorism is a major negative force against the formation of this solidarity. Since his peer group is mostly African-American, I worry about him picking up colorist messages... it's something I have absolute zero background in dealing with.

Most stuff about race and parenting deals with reinforcing the self-confidence of minority children in predominantly white environments. I have an overlapping but different set of concerns.

He asked me last week, "Am I black?" My answer sucked. I talked a lot about who his mothers and fathers were and what other people saw him as... I basically said "Yes, maybe, sort of, it's complicated."

I just don't want him to feel forced into any identity before he's ready. It was only last year that he kept telling me his bio father was white. In fact, he'd been confusing his mother's brother with his father. And then he would ask me if his mother was black.

So I don't want to force him into establishing an identity right now, but I also want him to develop a sense of solidarity, and I don't see these two goals fitting together very well at the moment. At least we've gone a long way towards establishing that race and identity are safe to talk about.

On the bright side of blogging, I've embarked on a major, ambitious blogging project at Racialicious: a series called "The Surface of Buddhism" (introduction and Part One here). I don't talk about my religion much. I don't even talk about it with friends and family. Yet again, I don't have a frame. I'm trying to draw one and fill it in at the same time.

Octuplet Rage and Foster Care

I'm not interested in attacking or defending the woman who had octuplets. I still don't fully comprehend why she's getting so much attention. I'm beginning to work it out, and the reasons are ugly.

As someone who's going through fertility treatments (albeit pretty mild ones) I know a fair amount about reproductive technology and about what having octuplets involves. It's scary. I would never get into that situation. If I even got CLOSE to that situation, I would hit the big red flashing ABORT button.

I think she made a pretty bad decision. I also think her doctor is unethical and the ART field should be more regulated, much like it is in Europe.

But in a larger context, people make bad decisions all the time... much worse decisions than she's made. There are men who go around creating babies like freaking lawn sprinklers without feeling the slightest sense of responsibility. These men don't end up all over the news. They don't get anonymous death threats because they're "wasting taxpayer money."

The hatred for her is way out of proportion. An article at Racialicious looks at the racial angle, and there definitely is a connection, because some of the vitriol ties into anti-immigrant sentiment. Ultimately, I think it's more like 60% sexism and 30% class and 10% race. She's become the archetypal "bad mother," a scapegoat for societal fear and loathing about women.

I just don't see what she's done to deserve all this rage. One criticism is that she's "stealing from taxpayers". What about all the bailed-out executives who got billions in bonuses? Her media rights will probably be enough cover medical expenses anyway, and even if they're not, any added tax burden is dwarfed by other more successful, less hated thieves.

The most disturbing part is the dehumanizing language toward her children, with so many people calling them a "litter". Whatever you've judged that she's done, they're little babies. Sins of the mother? Come on.

I wasn't going to post anything, but Torina just put up a rant, and I have to chime in and say that I feel much the same way. Apparently some of the commenters on this case are even saying that her babies should be taken away, which is ridiculous.

I CARE. I care about every kid out there. But those octuplet babies are STILL BEING TAKEN CARE OF. Let's worry about the KIDS THAT ARE NOT BEING TAKEN CARE OF. HELLOOOO!!!! They are all around us! There are 650 kids waiting in to be adopted from foster care in Minnesota RIGHT NOW. If you care about children, what about these kids???

Kids are removed because their parents NEGLECTED THEM, BEAT THEM, SEXUALLY ABUSED THEM. Not because their mom had too many eggs implanted by some idiot doctor. Let's start caring about the kids we already KNOW need us. These octuplet kids, as hare-brained as their mom might be, she hasn't hurt them or done anything criminal yet. So let's move on to the kids who really need us.

And to address another type of comment on this case -- as I've said here before, using children in foster care to condemn parenting choices you don't like can be really exploitative. "The octuplets' mother should have adopted from foster care" -- I don't think so. She sounds way too immature to handle that. I'm adopting from foster care, and I don't go around using my choice as some kind of self-righteous bludgeon, because that's not fair to anyone, including my son. Whenever anyone says "X should have adopted a waiting child instead of Y" I always wonder, have they put their money where their mouth is, have they themselves been through foster care, or have they been involved extensively in some other way? And if none of those things are true, they probably need to shut the hell up, because they're just exploiting the existence of waiting children without helping the situation at all.

Meandering Reproductive Thoughts

I'm on my first IUI.

I wasn't originally going to do any drugs, but my doctor persuaded me to take some. So for the last three weeks I've been taking a colorful spectrum of drugs to be swallowed, injected or otherwise inserted. I thought it would all be covered by my insurance, but it turns out the injectables weren't. Argh!

So far I haven't had any side effects other than an increased craving for carbohydrates. I'm definitely gaining weight because of this.

I've been reading a few fertility forums. The information is really valuable. But I have some problems dealing with the atmosphere of relentless positivity and emphasis on support at all costs. For example, the idea that mentions of pregnancy and childbirth are something that a lot of women need to be protected from.

I don't want to judge other people, because it's really about me and my own issues. Maybe I'm a horrible jerk who lacks empathy. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. In other types of environments where the goal is support at all costs, I've noticed that the goal is often achieved by stifling dissent or constructive criticism. I understand the need for "safe spaces" and I've benefited many times from belonging to them. The important part of a safe space is that you should be protected from people who deny your reality (something which can be depressingly common outside the safe space). But there's a tricky balance involved as well.

It's a bit easier to describe in terms of adoption communities. Forums that cater to adoptive parents are common. If an adoptive parent is feeling hurt or frustrated or in pain, the support can be really healthy. It can also be really counterproductive and infantilizing.

For example, on one forum I'm at (which is primarily but not 100% supportive) a parent asked for advice on how to explain that her young child, adopted from Russia, was of Roma descent. She was already fielding a lot of questions about how her child "really didn't look Russian". Especially in summer. She was worried about anti-Roma prejudice so she was thinking of how to keep her child's background from being a topic of discussion.

All the adoptive parents of color on the site, including myself, gave her the exact same advice. DON'T KEEP IT A SECRET. Emphasize Roma heritage and Roma pride. The child is going to have a much, much different experience of race than a white Russian adoptee. Realize that you're in a transracial adoption even though you never signed up for one. We all did this with as much politeness and empathy as possible.

She didn't want to hear our advice. She just wanted to be propped up in her decision to keep it a secret. In fact, she quickly left the forum in a huff because she wasn't "being supported".

A need for emotional support shouldn't translate into entitlement to act stupidly or selfishly.

And this has very little to do with infertility, but I'd like to mention how much I hate the word "triggered". I would never use it myself, because it reduces me to some horribly passive inanimate object. I can be insulted, angered, enraged, humiliated, upset, disturbed, shocked or saddened. But I can't be "triggered", unless I actually had a flashback or a seizure or something like that.

In any online environment where the word "triggered" is really popular, I get the impression that the participants are presenting themselves more as collections of traumas than the individual human beings that they undoubtedly are. Why would you want to depersonalize yourself? I don't understand the motivation.

I'm probably reading too much into it... ultimately, it's just a case where a word is undergoing a semantic shift.

Anyway, back to the infertility stuff. I'll make some posts about my protocols and results because I want to contribute to the same sharing of information that has already given me great benefit. But I'm just not into the emotional support aspect.

A set of information that really helped me was reading (on a different board) accounts of the LEEP procedure. I had that about twelve years ago for cervical dysplasia. I've wondered for years whether it would affect my fertility, but my doctor says my cervix looks great and is definitively healed.

I had such a terrible experience with the LEEP. It really have me a healthy fear and distrust of any medical professional who gets close to my reproductive system.

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have had the LEEP procedure at all. A lot of times if you come back in six months for another pap smear, the dysplasia clears up on its own. But the doctor recommended the LEEP and I was so scared of cervical cancer that I agreed with anything he said. I was told it would be a simple outpatient procedure with no pain, so I planned on taking the bus home afterwards. When I got onto the table, the nurse placed an oddly-shaped, heavy pad on my thigh. "What's that for?" I asked. "Oh, we're just grounding your thigh." That's when I started panicking. The doctor brushed aside my questions and gave me the attitude that he was doing me a big favor and I needed to quit whining... so I just laid back and let them go ahead and electrocute my cervix in what turned out to be the most painful experience of my entire life. And then I took the bus home.

Many women who had the LEEP procedure reported back that it was no big deal. But a few were like me, and said things like "OH MY GOD THE PAIN" and "I had a really painful natural childbirth and it was a walk in the park compared to the LEEP procedure." What must have happened was that the local anesthetic was not working correctly. Instead of giving me more anesthetic or looking into the problem, the doctor just didn't give a damn...

I wish this was all information I knew beforehand. But now I'm always going to research the hell out of any drug or procedure.

Let's see how IUI #1 goes.

Sunny recently asked me a birth-related question. We were talking about someone else's baby, and he asked, "how do babies get out?" I said they came out through the vagina, which was part of the private parts that women have. He seemed kind of weirded out by that. He said that that wasn't the only way that babies came out, sometime they came out through the stomach. I congratulated him on knowing that, and reminded him it was called a Cesarean section.

We haven't really had any big talk yet about this stuff, partly because he knows a fair amount about the facts of life already. He knows that you have "sex" and that women can get pregnant and have babies. He knows proper words for private parts but messes them up sometimes, most hilariously, "peanut" for "penis".

I've stressed the word "private parts" in that they're "private" and they belong to him only. For example, when I put lotion on him after the shower, he's always responsible for lotioning his own private parts. I think he needs to be more educated in this area, but I probably wouldn't be the best teacher. Luckily a group we belong to has great classes on stuff like this, so I think I need to sign him up soon.

I'm thinking about showing Sunny a carefully selected clip from a great documentary called The Business of Being Born. There are a few scenes where a woman gives birth very easily, at home, with no blood and no screaming, and it's very inspiring (although not terribly representative of the average birth).

Weekend Wrapup

I was just reading here on the Angry Asian Man site about the Rosie O'Donnell incident on The View (a show I'm not familiar with at all), in which she used "ching chong" language to mock Chinese people. This is so upsetting to me that I can't even force myself to watch the linked clip. She acknowledged the language on her website but hasn't apologized. I was thinking about writing a blog post in the form of a letter to her TV show on exactly how it's upsetting and why it's such a nasty slur on all Asian people. When I was little I remember being surrounded by kids yelling those words into my face, and I've gotten into physical altercations over them. I could describe the feelings I had then as a young girl, and ask her if she ever wants her kids to feel that way, or to let them make other kids feel that way. But I have too much stress in my life right now to dredge that all up and order it neatly in writing. Instead, later this week I'll contribute somehow to a campaign asking her to apologize, which I hope someone will organize shortly. Ugh.

I haven't had time to see Apocalypto yet. Hopefully, I can make it this week. I read this viewpoint from an archaeologist -- Is "Apocalypto" Pornography? -- that discusses the details of some serious flaws that one would expect in the movie. The costume design is apparently as good as it seems in the trailer, though. I do take issue with how the reviewer wraps up by saying that Braveheart is a good movie. That kind of destroys her credibility as a film critic for me, since I think Braveheart was overall a boring, bombastic piece of crap interspersed with a gratuitous nasty homophobic subplot and about 20-25 minutes of awesome battle scenes.

I feel like I'm ending the weekend on a positive note... that is, as long as no one kills off any of my favorite characters on tonight's season finale of The Wire. The reason is that I've managed to create the optimal flexible timetable for adoption versus conception! It's got the family seal of approval, and now I just need to run it by the agency worker on our first homestudy appointment.

Stage One: Prep. My dad gets his ankle operation done in January, recuperates for 6-10 weeks and then departs our extra bedroom to return to Japan by April 2007. Our homestudy, which should be written by then, gets activated as soon as he clears the bedroom, but matching will almost certainly not begin right after that.

Stage Two: Waiting. We will be either waiting for matching or in the process of matching or committee, and also in a parallel attempt to conceive. I am willing to try some measures my gynecologist might suggest, but not anything on the scale of IVF or that involves a high risk of multiple births.

Stage Three: Pregnancy Deadline. I get pregnant. I call the agency, let them know what's up and say we need to go on hold within a month. If we happen to get matched before that month is up (although this isn't really likely) then great! We will be able to give the adopted child 100% of our attention for 8 months until I give birth.

Stage Four: Waiting Again (with a baby). I get pregnant without matching. We keep our application on hold until the baby is one years old, and then update the homestudy and go active again. Alternately, I could have a miscarriage, which sends us back to Stage Two to start over again. A friend of mine recently had a miscarriage so I know I shouldn't discount that possibility.

Recovery

I hate Vicodin! It's really nice as long as I'm just lying in bed sleeping or staring at the ceiling. But if I try to do anything else, like reading or watching Battlestar Galactica, it makes me feel disgusting and nauseous. I took my last Vicodin at 8am this morning, and so far the 600 mg ibuprofen pills are doing the job by themselves, as long as I move slowly.

I talked to our worker today. She said the agency is happy to work with us in our new expanded 0-7 age range, and our first homestudy appointment can come the week after next. I told her all about my fertility situation and the current state of uncertainty. My ideal situation would be to get a placement, have one year just bonding with the child and giving them 100% of the attention, then conceive a little brother or sister. But this is just impossible to plan. Neither time to conception nor time to placement can be known for sure. If I get pregnant before we get matched, we would probably have to postpone adoption for a year, and she says the agency would be fine with doing that.

My mother subbed for my ESL class last night; because of horrific traffic only one student showed up. I'd assigned a homework essay called "Letter to Your Congressperson". The students had to write a letter with three parts: personal introduction and why the issue matters to them, the problem, and then the suggested solution. I'd expected students to write about some of the big-picture issues we've been touching on all year, like immigration and the war in Iraq. But the student who turned his letter in for correction actually wrote to request that Russian-language programming be added to the cable package at his subsidized apartment complex. Now that's a local issue! She said the letter was quite logical and persuasive.

Laparoscopy Results

I had the result I least expected. My fallopian tubes are 100% normal! During the earlier HSG test, I must have had something called a tubal spasm that affected the results and gave a false indication that my tubes were blocked.

I'm not very lucid right now, since I'm on Vicodin. But we (my husband and I, with input from my mother) have talked about what to do next. We want to conceive a child. If we can do it without IVF, then the sooner the better. On the other hand, we may still have unexplained infertility, in which case we're back where we started.

Either way, we're still set on foster care adoption. We'll need to alter our parameters, though. For example, it's not a good idea to adopt two siblings if there's a chance we might have a baby soon after placement.

The next step is to consult with our doctor and our agency.

Despite soreness and wooziness, I'm basically happy. My uncertainty has expanded, but so have my possible choices.

Graduation I

We had graduation last night. I'm going to miss our classmates. Several of them have already adopted, so I found it incredibly valuable to hear from people who were already experienced in the subject and had great, positive things to say about it. Hopefully I will see many of them again in the support group after we adopt. Everyone loved my lasagna. I have to brag about it and say it was the best dish at the potluck. The only other dish that came close was a jambalaya someone's relative brought in.

I don't feel comfortable telling any of our classmates' stories on this blog, even anonymously, and even though the stories are so illuminating. However, I will tell a little story from a presenting couple. Last night we had a mini-panel with two special presenters: a therapeutic foster mother and an interracial couple (black/white) who had adopted from the agency several years ago. After mentioning how their two adopted sons, who are biological siblings, have totally different personalities, the couple talked a little bit about race; specifically, how their sons handled the same question at school, "Why is your momma white?" One son would say "Because that's the way God made her." The other would say "Because she IS!!!".

By the end of this week we will know for sure whether we're staying with our agency. I really hope we do. It's a very warm environment. The other couple said they'd visited many other agencies during their adoption journey, angrily mentioning they felt some of them were "selling babies". I'm worried because I don't feel comfortable with many of the other choices out there, either. Especially since we're not Christian.

Tomorrow I'm also having my laparoscopy, and I'll be recuperating Friday and all weekend. I plan on catching up on Battlestar Galactica Season I and finishing Jeff Vandermeer's Shriek: An Afterword. My little dog will be so happy to have me hanging around all day. I'm going to draft my mother to teach my ESL class tomorrow night.

Laparoscopy Pre-Op

I had an appointment with my doctor today to talk about my upcoming diagnostic laparoscopy. Although I have an "unremarkable" uterus (this is good) and my hormones and ovaries are fine, there's an issue with both my fallopian tubes. The laparoscopy will use a camera to determine the exact extent of the issue. If there's any non-trivial blockage, I've asked the doctor to go ahead and remove the tubes. There's no reason to leave them in if they're damaged, and having them taken out would completely take away any risk of ectopic pregnancy, which I'm absolutely terrified of.

After the laparoscopy, I could find out that my reproductive system is just totally normal, or else that I'm incapable of natural pregnancy. If it's the latter, there won't be much of an impact. But I don't know what I'd do if I find out I'm normal. I told my husband and mother in that case I'm leaning towards birth control for a year or until a first adoptive placement gets settled. My husband is very intelligent but handicapped at "emotional multitasking" or thinking in two different ways at the same time, so his only response to that was "we'll just take it as it comes and see what happens". I guess this is the drawback of deciding on adoption before my infertility is 100% determined.

Otherwise it was a pretty good day. We had an amazing rabbit stew for dinner at my mother's and are settling in to watch "Heroes" tonight.

Infertility and Adoption

I picked up the last of my medical paperwork today over the weekend. The doctor, seeing my adoption medical form, asked me in a polite way if I had experienced fertility problems. I told her yes, and that although I'm probably a great candidate for IVF, my husband and I had decided on adoption.

She told me she also has problems. She and her husband have been exploring surrogacy, which tells me her reproductive problems could be a lot bigger than mine. She said she was tired of the years of treatment and ready for adoption, but her husband wasn't there yet. A tired look even came over her face when she said that.

I'm so incredibly glad I'm not in her position. It took me no longer than a few minutes to decide on adoption, and then a few seconds for my husband to agree. I already had it in mind as a backup plan.

Calling adoption a backup plan is not a happy thing, but to be brutally honest, that's what it often is. It's rare for fertile couples to think of adoption before a pregnancy. One reason is logistics. Adoption is long, drawn-out, strewn with ethical dilemmas, uncertain and often extremely expensive, especially when you compare it to the "have sex, then wait nine months" recipe. I don't mean to disparage pregnancy in any way, but it's an easier path to start walking on, with well-marked signs, no matter how difficult, tortuous and nerve-wracking it can get before the child arrives.

Reading Adam Pertman's book Adoption Nation taught me a great way to look at adoption and infertility. The circumstances surrounding a child's birth, like those surrounding the child's adoption, affect a child's destiny but should not be allowed to determine it. An adoptee may suffer mental anguish thinking of themselves as a "Plan B", but other children may also be hurt by knowing their birth was a happy or unhappy accident, or that their mother seriously considered abortion, and so on. Just because a child does not have two parents that loved each other, fully intended to have that child and planned well for the arrival does not mean there is a curse on that child and their parents. Otherwise, for example, children of rape would be doomed, and so would their mother. No matter how a child comes into the world, they deserve the same love.

That's not to say that the child won't have issues with the way they came into the world. They certainly will. I know I'll have to gracefully deal with lots of these issues as the child grows up and do my best to ensure they have a healthy connection to their first family. From the foster care system, it's pretty hard to get a sense of how that will play out. On the down side, maybe they'll be in jail or be too unstable for regular contact, or vanished… or maybe the extended family will be such an integral part of the child's support system that they'll never have to wonder or worry about where they came from.

So as much as I dislike saying it, adoption was Plan B, compared to natural pregnancy as Plan A and assisted reproduction as Plan C. But now that I've started out on the adoption path, those other choices seem pretty distant. It bothers me when people trot out the old cliché, "now that you're adopting, you'll get pregnant". I go into geek mode and tell them that statistically speaking, that is entirely false, and that the vast majority of fertility-impaired women who don't get pregnant while adopting tend not to stick out in the public consciousness. It bothers me because I have made the mental switch and now think of pregnancy as a cold, distant, abstract possibility, not as something I really want or need.