All's Quiet

I finished my three adoption books. I think I learned a lot from them. I gave Secret Thoughts to my mother to read because I thought it would help her understand better. My brother and SIL never said much about L's adoption and how she or they would approach the issues that might come up. They didn't educate us much about adoption. It was never a secret or something shameful. It just was.

Now that we're approaching becoming adoptive parents, we're taking a very different stance. We want to tell everybody all about it. Once an actual baby comes home things will shift, but we want to educate first. I think some of the differences between our situations is that they choose adoption after they had been matched -- it was a parent initiated adoption. They never went into a waiting pool so the situation was very different.

Anyway, if you haven't read The Kid by Dan Savage, I can't recommend it enough. Though there are some differences in the situation as they are a gay couple and didn't deal with infertility in the same way most of us have, he is sensitive to the concept of infertility, and he really speaks to openness in adoption and the implications of raising a child genetically related to someone else.

The most insightful part to me is when they take The Kid home and how it affects his birth mother as well as how it affects Dan and Terry. It is incredibly moving, and it really encapsulates all of the difficulties that are part of the adoptive process. To enter into adoption with eyes wide open is incredibly important, and it helped me to share their story and do just that. Along with the birth mothers I heard from a couple weeks ago at our Adoption Agency meeting and this book, I feel like I am preparing myself for what adoption will truly be like.

So, I'm still feeling contemplative about all of this. Doing a lot of thinking and not a lot of doing. Not much else is going on. The weather is getting cold, the leaves are turning, and I'm thinking about life.

Oh, and I think T and I have decided to sell our two vials of donor sperm back to the cryobank. I don't think we're going to do any more dIUIs.

And if the Routan commercials with Brooke Shields piss you off as much as they piss me off, complain to them by clicking on Contact Us at the bottom of this page. I told them that I now hate the Volkswagen brand since they started these commercials -- and I used to own one.

Books

So, in my sadness I bought some books. I bought the Dan Savage The Kid book, Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother and Making Room In Our Hearts. I'm almost done with Secret Thoughts. It makes a lot of sense to me. It is good to be reading these things and putting myself in someone else's head, I think. She has gone through this and is just writing what she feels. It's almost like reading someone's blog, I think.

In Making Room, it is really interesting to read the birth parents' point of view and the adoptees' point of view of how all of this open adoption stuff works. What I especially like is it's the perspective of older children or adoptees that are now adults and have grown up with open adoption. This is the part that I feel the least comfortable with. It's not the part while we're raising our children that freaks me out as much as what happens after our children are adults. So, this book is helping me get a peek of what it will be like.

I spoke again with our facilitator last night. I still like her. I think I may even start filling out her application. I really think we will be going in that direction, but I don't want to commit until we have our agency meeting that discusses search expansion. I told this to her and she understood. She thinks it's good that we are doing all of this research before making a commitment. She understands that this is an important decision and it has to be the right fit. This is why I like her.

T has to work today, so I am home by myself. I think I may go to a craft store that is closing and see what is left and on sale. I am also going to work more on the book. It is done, but we decided to double side it so I need to move things around so that the holes we punch in it don't pierce any words or pictures.

Hanging in....