On Adoption

There are two women at work that I see regularly who are pregnant. I generally do pretty well around pregnant people -- I just have a twinge of jealousy, a small internal eye-roll and a small amount of panic that they're going to talk about it. I cannot really talk about pregnancy.

But the other day I just had this realization that I really will never, ever be pregnant long enough to give birth to a living baby. This thing that women around the world generally do, I will never do. And I will not be excluded from this thing that women do by choice. I was boxed out of it against my will, despite Herculean efforts.

I know when I have my baby (babies) I will love them more than anything. I know I am emotionally ready to be an adoptive parent. I have never been more sure of anything.

But I just can't believe I will never be part of that club. And it really does make me sad sometimes.

Book started

I finally started to work on the book. I feel like I have a completed draft of the Dear Birth Mother letter and I have about 25 or so pictures in somewhat of a layout for a book. I'm feeling pretty proud of myself for getting all of this down. I'm getting much closer, and I'm trying to keep my "glue it down and move on" motto in the back of my head while doing this. We are going to do the booklet in "landscape" format (which hopefully is okay) because the computer program that I am using won't let me switch the pages around. If this isn't okay, all of my work will be for naught, so I suppose I should check on that. Hm.

It's funny how few pictures we have of the two of us. We have some of one and some of the other, but not a lot of both. I'm going to include a montage of my knitting/crocheting and some pictures of the "baby's room." I have pictures of the house and yard. I suppose we should go to some of the nearby parks and include that in there too.

The captions are really difficult. I want to be informative, but I also want to make sure our personality shows through.

I've also noticed there are more pictures with one of my brother's family than the other. This is probably because we spend more time with one than the other, but I wish I had a couple more of that other side. There are only a few pictures of my nephew and they are only in big groups. He and I are pretty close, so I want to get something in there.

This book is so hard. It feels so inadequate. I feel really accomplished with what I have done, but I just am not feeling too good about all of this working out. Sigh.

Tomorrow's Monday and it's off to work again. I wish I could take a couple days off, but alas that is not in the cards for me. Next week is a long weekend, so maybe that will help a little.

But I did start the booklet, and that is a really, really good thing.

Blogging for the sake of blogging

Thanks for the carpool comments. I think I'm going to do the quiet time thingy. I like carpooling because it's good for the environment. I'll try it for a while longer. Neither of the other carpoolers have cars, which is why I drive all the time, and I don't want a later shift and there is no such thing as an earlier shift, so my hours are my hours. We'll see how it goes. I exchanged 3 sentences with the genius today and didn't get annoyed. If I can keep him quiet enough it might be okay.

There's still a lot going on. My friend Jess is coming from overseas on Wednesday and I need to prepare the bed for her. Then my friend J is staying at my house one night over Labor Day because she is moving and has the out by the 31st/in on the 1st problem. Meantime our last Home Study Visit is Tuesday 9/2 and our yard looks like crap. That probably won't make us fail, but I'd like to have pictures of a nice yard for our book. Maybe we should hire someone. We are not do-it-yourselfers at all. I can do a little bit, but my darling T is really no help at all. He's much more of a pay-someone-to-do-it type.

I wrote my paragraph about T. T has started his paragraph about me, but I need him to finish it. I'll make him do it tonight.

We have plans to see E&R and baby S this weekend so we can take pictures of us with little S so that expectant parents can see us with a kid.

Work's feeling a little tedious this week. There is a lot of moving around going on in my department, so I'm hopeful that this will open up a promotion type position for me.

Our poor girl kitty was feeling ill and went to the vet and is now on antibiotics. She is doing much better now, though. So this is good.

I feel so busy. I know busy is good, but I also feel like I want to slow down a little. I want to take a day off work, but I don't have the vacation time and I requested time off for the Jewish high holy days and I need all my hours for that.

I guess that's about it from here. My mind is spinning.

Carpool

About a month after I started my job, a woman sent me an email saying she lived in my neighborhood, and it turns out that we live on the same street. She lives on one end, and I live on the other. I casually mentioned that we could carpool. Turns out that her husband uses the car and she took public transportation to work, which took about an hour and a half and cost over $100 per month. She leaped at the chance to carpool with me.

She told me there was a guy who works in her department that she gave rides to the one day a week she sometimes got the car. She asked if I could bring him along as well. Not knowing who he was, I said sure, as long as I didn't have to go out of my way.

Turns out that guy was the annoying guy I had noticed in the hallway before. Not even knowing him, he rubbed me the wrong way. I heard them talking often, and I had always hoped to stay as far away from both of them as possible.

The woman is a little quirky and talks about her kids too much. But I can live with that. The guy (who I have nicknamed "the genius") drives me bat shit. There are not many people that I really actively do not like, but this guy is one of them. Even him being near me bothers me. He just drives me nuts. He has no social skills, he talks too loud, he thinks he knows a lot when actually he knows nothing (hence his nickname) and he is just a generally annoying person. Other people at work feel the same way about him. He's just one of those people that just doesn't get along well with people in general. He's not mean; he's not malicious; he tries to be friendly; it's just that his social overtures do not work. His mother had to take him out of school to home school him because he got to much crap in middle school. Nobody likes him. Including me. I don't wish any ill will toward him. I just want him to stay away from me.

Now I am in the car with them daily. The genius has been working overtime all month in the hopes of having enough money to move. "Great!" I thought. He'll probably move away so I won't have to drive him anymore.

But remember who I am and what kind of luck I have. He saw an apartment this weekend in my neighborhood and it looks like he may move around the corner. I've been able to drop him off about halfway home so that I could have a bit of a ride without him, but if he moves to this apartment I will spent 1-2 hours per day with him in the car.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get out of this situation. I don't mind sharing the ride and the gas money with that woman most of the time, but I really don't want this guy in my car any more. I haven't said anything to him. I don't know what to say. The woman knows that I don't like him.

I feel so caught. I'm not a mean person. I don't really want to hurt his feelings. I just want my peace and quiet during my commute back. (I can't listen to the news in the car anymore because the genius starts conversations about politics and the news that I don't want to have.) I want to tell him I can't give him a ride any more, but what about the woman?

I took this job to reduce my stress. I didn't know that carpooling would cause this type of stress.

I'm trying to just forget it. "Like water off a duck's back," T tells me. Should I just suck it up and drive him and try to listen to something that keeps him quiet? Can I just find a way to tell him he can't drive with me any more?

I have never felt so stuck over something so seemingly silly.

Show and Tell

This is the lunch I had in Murdo, SD. It was home made ham salad using the leftover ham from the dinner special from the day before. The sour cherry pie was some of the best pie I have ever eaten. The diner was small and family run. Eating there felt like going back in time to when things were slower and life was all right there in your small town. It was delicious. These are the things I'm going to remember from our drive across this country of ours.

Busy again

It's a busy week. Tuesday my friend N came over for dinner. I made pesto from the fresh box of veggies we get each week. It was delicious. Last night I went to a concert with my knitting friend J. The traffic was awful and it took us 3 hours to get there and the headlining band (Radio.head) started before we were able to get there. I have never seen such traffic in my life. It is going to be difficult to get me to go to this concert venue again. Today I am working a late shift so I did get to sleep in after getting home after 1 am. So at least that is good. Then it is Friday and this weekend is our annual trip to the fireworks festival we go to. So excited for that one. We go to the Maple Barn and then we go see fireworks. It's a great day and they are the best fireworks ever.

Today before work, since I don't have to be there until the afternoon, I am dropping a large part of our adoption paperwork off with the agency. Our paperwork is nearly complete. We only have to get T's physical paperwork and it will be done.

But we still have three huge things to do. 1) Fill out the form that talks about race, drug and alcohol use in the birthparents, etc. 2) Dear Birth Mother Letter 3) The Book.

So a lot of the nitpicky stuff is all done, but those three things are the most difficult part. I haven't been working on the m at all lately. I have a draft of the letter and a folder with a bunch of pictures in it. We've been thinking about the categories on the form and we're going to sit with our therapist and talk about it. I need to contact a pediatrician in order to get some real information about the effects of drug and alcohol use on a fetus. All of these things take time (and privacy) and I need to find a way to get moving on them.

Yay weekend

I am so happy that it is the weekend. This weekend our nieces L&E are coming to stay for Saturday night. They're 10 and 11 and we'll take them into the city, probably to Fanueil Hall to go shopping and maybe out to dinner. We just bought a Wii so we hope to set that up for them. They are so excited to come, and we're happy to have them. It should be fun.

I think I've finished a first draft of my Dear Birth Mother letter. We are missing a bit and I'm sure it needs a large amount of tweaking, but it's something. I also have 22 photos for the book. We're supposed to have more like 40, so we have a lot of work to do. We're both pretty camera shy, so we have to break out the camera and start taking pictures of everything.

I have a couple of busy weeks coming up. I'm supposed to set up our appointment for Home Study Visit #3, which should be the final visit. I haven't done that yet. I just sent some emails.

I have to go clean the house a little to get ready for the girls.

I'm just so happy it's the weekend!

The support group

Well, I go to make my post today and there on my Dashboard are pictures of three newborn babies, the newest part of the blogger family and all the "buzz" at Blogger. Yay.

It used to be that pictures of newborns made me want to cry. Now seeing pictures like that just makes me roll my eyes. Is that progress? I'm not so sure.

There was only one other couple at the support group plus a social worker / adoptive mom. I guess I really need to bitch about all of this stuff because I definitely felt a little better afterward. We will definitely drag our butts all the way out there again for another one of those. We just discussed all of the issues and got to complain about how much everything sucks and we asked questions of the adoptive mom/social worker.

My new mantra from the support group meeting? "Glue it down and move on."

This is what the woman in the couple told herself after freaking out about which pictures to put in the picture book thingy. I have to take this attitude. I have to have this attitude for both the birthmother letter and the book. I just need to be truthful and choose what I choose and put it down and move on. Glue it down and move on.

I still haven't written any more. But I'm going to. And I think I can look at this with fresh eyes, so the support group was good.

In other news AF is here again. I think about going on the pill again just so I don't have false hope any more. My hope is much smaller than it used to be, and it's not like we're really trying or anything. But I can't help but hope a little. I wonder if that's bad. I wonder if I should just go on the pill so I have no hope at all. Any thoughts on this?

How to motivate

I'm sitting here at he computer knowing I need to get my ass in gear and work on the dear birth mother letter and our profile book, but I just don't know how to do it. I was thinking about it in the shower and now I'm feeling pretty sad. Since our social worker suggested that I think of it as a way to tell 'our child' his or her birth story I've been trying to determine how to think of that way.

But 'our child' is what's stopping me. How can I possibly imagine actually having an actual child? I cannot. I cannot think that way. So what am I supposed to do? How can I motivate. I am really struggling here.

All I can think of is all of our failure. How can I possibly imagine 'our child' when all we've had is loss? I just didn't think that suggestion was particularly helpful and I need something else to help myself motivate.

I just keep going over and over our story and it makes me so sad. It's amazing how many things we've tried and in how many ways things have gone wrong. I know I'm not supposed to think about it, but I do. Or I did. I was in the shower thinking about it and I went over our whole story again in my head thinking how the social worker would think it might be possible for us to have failure after failure and loss after loss but think about the book as something to share with our child. Clearly she hasn't had the same experiences as us. I believe she has two biological sons and a daughter from China, but I'm not positive.

And the other think I hate about it is that what these things are are marketing tools for T and me as a couple. I hate marketing. I think marketing is the cause of everything that is wrong with this country and I don't like anything that has to do with it. So I'm not very happy to have to market myself to someone -- especially someone who has to do something as difficult as create an adoption plan for her child.

I'm feeling so negative about this right now. How is this not awful?

Anyway, I guess I'll stop complaining and try writing. I think just getting all of this negativity out here might help me be able to work on the other things. So the blog might be even more negative than usual (if you can imagine such a thing) so I can vent and let all of the negativity out in order to enable me to work on these documents.