Late to the epiphany
It’s taken me awhile to blog the pomegranate thread post even though I was asked to feature it awhile back. I was trying to figure out why I was so reluctant and then I realized it was because I felt like a hypocrite: I’m not wearing a pomegranate thread and have no plans to.
I don’t mind talking about my infertility — I’m certainly not ashamed of it — but I also don’t identify as someone infertile anymore. Formerly infertile is how I think of it. Then I was thinking about it in terms of the secondary infertility book I wanted to write specifically because an agent contacted me this week asking if I had representation for the project. (This was after she read something else I wrote and saw in my bio that I was working on a book.) That made me think about the very nice proposal that I worked really hard on and is piece of work I’m pretty darn proud of and I thought, well, what the heck. Maybe if I send her the proposal she can help me figure out the focus of the sample chapter and then I’ll be going to the conference and I’ll probably get all riled up and then I’ll actually write it.
You know — You know — if I don’t do it that someone else is going to write a kick ass secondary infertility book and I’ll be all, “Darn them! That shoulda been me!” But that would be a lie because if it should have been me I would have written the sample chapter by now.
The truth is, I have never been very interested in the practicalities of infertility — the tests, the procedures. My interest has always but always been on the cultural experience of infertility and my bias has been pretty negative to the medical fertility establishment. It’s a bias that could potentially hurt (or who knows — help?) my work but it kept me on the outskirts of infertility blogging and the infertility community at large. I’m certainly NOT against any woman making the free choice to seek treatment but I think the treatment doesn’t address the whole experience of infertility and I think that the culture around treatment is emotionally coercive and also takes away our ability to define our own experiences. (I really want to write about that — I’ve got notes for days — but not the rest of it so much.) Because I know this isn’t really a popular view for people in the midst of hard treatment decisions, I tend to stay out of the discussion. It’s one thing to write a generalized blog entry or article; I don’t want to every appear unsupportive to a particular woman moving forward to the next treatment cycle. I want to be really clear about that. It’s not the individual choice that’s an issue for me; it’s the way our choices get dictated by other people’s ideas about what it means to be infertile.
So anyway. The book. I don’t know how I’d promite it. And promoting it is a huge part of writing it. More and more I want to write (obviously) about adoption. Which leads me back to the pomegranate string.
One reason I wouldn’t wear the string is that while I don’t mind talking about my infertility experiences or my miscarriage experiences, I don’t feel comfortable advertising myself as a formal infertile in front of my daughter. There was a time in my own infertility story when adoption seemed like a last ditch effort; I wanted a bio baby. I understand that other people grappling with infertility feel this way and I’m not insulted by it. I very much shut the door on my infertility before we sent away for the first adoption brochure — we felt adoption was out of reach for a lot of reasons so there wasn’t really this “oh well, if worse comes to worse, I guess we’ll just have to adopt” in our infertility plans. Adoption was something I wanted to do as well as have another baby but it was a far-off thing — for when we were more settled and more financially stable. But this time? I wanted my “own” baby.
When our insurance ran out, I worked on being ok having one child. I knew I was done with infertility because (I just wrote this to DD) the idea of quitting seemed like a relief and not a capitulation. I’m sure I wrote about it somewhere in here but I distinctly remember being at a park seeing a family of four (oh blessed family of four!) and then looking over at my solitary son on the swings and getting ready for that wave of hurt and instead I felt … I felt lucky. And happy. I saw my son for what he was — a happy, beautiful little boy — and I saw myself for what I was — a fortunate woman with a loving husband — and I knew it would be all right. The relief I felt was pointed — like a jolt of intense joy. It brought tears to my eyes. There were still hard days to come but I knew I was walking out of them. And it was long after that that we came back to adoption and realized that maybe we could do it.
(I have an essay about this, which I love but someone on the distaff-writers list pointed out that there’s no mention of Madison and so my acceptance to being a mother to one rings false. I don’t know. That epiphany is what made adoption possible to me, true, but that came later. I put infertility to bed first and that’s what the essay is about. I’m not sure what to do with it now. Is it like writing an essay about being a happy single and then not publishing it ’til you’re remarried? I wrote the bulk of it pre-Madison and then edited it all up post-Madison. Feel free to share your thoughts on that one — would you dismiss an essay if the bio made it clear that the person had moved to another emotional space after the epiphany illustrated in said essay?)
Now infertility did have an impact on our adoption. It brought us to it earlier and it brought us to domestic infant adoption instead of foster-to-adopt. But it was never a “we can always adopt — I guess — if we have to” kind of thing.
But I understand that this isn’t the perception that people have when they hear we were infertile. I know this because it isn’t what I would have heard when I was knee-deep in my infertility. If I were wearing a pomegranate string and I was walking around with my transracially adopted daughter, I wouldn’t want to invite someone in the know about pomegranate strings to assume that Madison was a next-best-thing, you know? It’s one thing to — in the course of a personal conversation — ask if we had had trouble conceiving but it’s another thing to invite people to make assumptions about our family building in front of my small, perfect, far-from-second-best daughter.
I was really struck when Susan, an adoptee, said that it can be hurtful to read infertility-to-adoption stories and it made me think hard about how we’re going to talk about this with Madison. I remember during one visit with Jessica early on when she asked carefully, “Why didn’t you guys just have another baby? What brought you to adoption?” And I stuttered something about miscarriages, blah blah blah, how we’d always wanted to adopt, blah blah blah. I realized how inadequately I’d prepared myself to explain the connection between my infertility and Madison’s adoption. I had no idea how to help someone else see that it wasn’t a point A to point B thing and that Madison is NOT a substitute for a child we couldn’t build from scratch. It was glaringly apparent to me in a way that it hadn’t been before that our infertility was just — bumbling. Just bumbling on our way to Madison, on our way to Jessica, on our way to adoption. But to explain that is hard, especially with the ingrained idea that you try to have your “own” and then, if all else fails, you can always adopt.
I am grateful for my infertility. I’m grateful that it kept us from making a baby and missing out on Madison. I’m grateful that it led me to domestic infant adoption and to Jessica and to a new understanding of motherhood. I am humbled by the privilege of being part of the triad and I know that the whole experience made me a better woman. I feel pretty damn lucky to have been infertile.
There are parts that originally made me want to write the book (and that sometimes STILL make me want to write the book): the confusion in my support groups; the peer pressure we put on each other; the mindless race to be “more” infertile in order to justify our pain; the insensitive doctors; the painful treatment decisions; the loss of a spiritual life in the face of our failing bodies; the humility; the shame; the friendships that fell apart. All of that — that was the cultural experience of infertility. That’s the part that still interests me and nearly makes me want to tie a pomegranate thread onto my wrist.
So I’ve thought about what we’ll tell Madison. And what I’ve thought about — keeping in mind our spiritual beliefs — is this. We wanted another baby and so we tried what we thought would be the easy way — make one from scratch. Only that baby wasn’t showing up and we couldn’t understand it. Then it became clear to us: We were looking for a baby in the wrong place! Our baby was meant to come to us another way — through another person meant to be part of our family. This is how Jessica found us and how we found her. (As an aside, Jessica and I have talked about this — this story works for her, that we were meant to be part of each other’s lives/families.) As she gets older, I hope she will believe me when I say that it was her we were waiting for all along. I want her to know that I am a better mother because of who she is and how she arrived to the family. I am so so so grateful that I was lucky enough to adopt and I never ever ever ever ever regret that I wasn’t able to conceive and give birth to another baby. She is FIRST best and I’m glad it took me a few years for our way to become clear because I might have accidentally adopted someone else and missed out on not just Madison but Jessica. I can’t imagine my life without either one of them.
So much nodding my head in agreement here. I have so much to say, but you have pretty much nailed it. You mirrored many of thoughts.
I’ve never really thought of it that way. Maybe it is because Bug thinks of bio kids as second best. Hahaha.
I can see where you are coming from..although my situation would be reversed. If I had a bio child would people think that I wasn’t happy with my adopted one?
I was happy to post about the idea, although to be honest I am not wearing one either.
hmmmm…. lots to think about here! i have no idea what a pomegranete thread is. i have lots of ideas about the infertility-to-adoption journey, but not thought-out enough to post here — maybe a blog entry soon! i would love love love to read more — any and all — of your own thoughts, epiphanies, etc.
i bought yoga journal recently and loved your piece! i felt so proud to “know” you, i almost wanted to tell the clerk at rei (where i was buying yoga pants!), “see this article, the author is a friend of mine!” isn’t it a funny thing to feel pride-of-friendship for someone i’ve never met? but i did! it was great!
What a wonderful post. We adopted our oldest child the week we found out I was pregnant with our second child. The pregnancy was from fertility treatments and I had had many miscarriages previously.
I absolutely know that we were meant to be led to adoption because we needed to be Mike’s parents. And then came Robbie and Chip, and our family-building was not what we expected, but exactly the way it was meant to be.
Type your comment here.
We are a secondary infertility Jewish family, currently waiting to adopt domestically. It is so strange to read someone talking about the acceptance and changes you go through during this period. I just blogged recently about a wave of acceptance I had recently as a mother of a singleton. I know now that if adoption doesn’t work out for us I will be okay, sad for a while, but okay. We have been trying to conceive or adopt a second child for more than 7 years. I read about the pomegranete thread recently, but I didn’t want anyone to confuse me the Kabbalah people. Nor do I really want to share details about my reproductive history.
Thanks for writing
I want to tell you that your thoughts on the cultural experience of infertility are fascinating to me. I am not an adoptive parent, I do not have experience with infertility or miscarriage, and yet I want to know about these things. They are part of the world of motherhood and you are just the gal to explain it to me in a book. I hope you go for it. I will be the first in line to buy it.
“an agent contacted me this week”. That’s what you wrote, right? Right? An AGENT contacted YOU!!!! Do you know how often that happens to ordinary people like us? Do you know? It NEVER happens, an agent NEVER EVER calls and says “Hey, let me see what ya got!” Puhleeeeeese tell me you’re going to send her something because I’m not sure from this post that you are going to do that.
Oh geez I just wrote a huge response and it got erased. Ah well.
I love this post and I totally relate. I too no longer consider myself “infertile” and to be honest I’m not sure I ever did. We quit the baby making game before it got crazy… no diagnostic testing, no drugs, no treatment. We just bailed out and decided our hearts were somewhere else. And we found that somewhere else… in the arms of a pretty amazing 15 year old girl. We are proud to have both our daughter and her birth mother as part of our family now.
People never understood why we didn’t exhaust every medical option under the sun FIRST. Like why adopt if there’s a chance you could have a bio kid? Well why not? Why is it a “second best”?
I would love to see a book on the culture of infertility. I think it would be hugely enlightening to a lot of people. But, adoption is perhaps closer to your heart, and maybe that would be a better topic to pursue.
“would you dismiss an essay if the bio made it clear that the person had moved to another emotional space after the epiphany illustrated in said essay?”
Just quoting to make it clear which though I’m addressing.
No, I wouldn’t dismiss such an essay. I’d probably read the essay, then read the bio, see that it said “has adopted a second child since writing this essay” (or something similar) and think, “Oh, she changed her mind.”
Of course, I think it would be very, very interesting to have two pieces published together: that essay, and another talking about how that epiphany prepared you for Madison, and how your emotional space moved along.
Dawn–this was so well-written. Really gorgeous writing summing up so many interesting thoughts. I think that you sensitivity to how Madison perceives what you do and what you present to the world is what makes you a great mom. It’s so important to see the big picture and present those true impulses and feelings to your child. I think writing a book about that would be great.
The thread definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s an “opt in” idea with people who are open to speaking about their journey (which may mean in front of their kids sometimes). Not a label just so we can pick out other people who have been through infertility. There needs to be a purpose to the label–and it’s simply to make connections and exchange information and be a community. And that can’t happen with everyone’s journey–and when our kids are at a different age, I may feel differently. Right now, we speak about it frankly in front of them with the idea being that we present our feelings about their birth (we’re proud of their birth) along with a tone in our answer that conveys that it’s not okay for other people to question our choices.
I think my mother is a fantastic parent of both adopted and bio kids (using fertility drugs). And I wish I could mimic the magic she brings to our family because she made our family feel seamless inside the house and gave us the tools to speak about our family outside the house.
Great post, Dawn.
I think that acceptance of a singleton and then adopting (which I am certain better prepared you to be an adoptive mom!) could be compared to marriage in a helpful way.
If you are happy with yourself and basically contented living on your own, you are going to make someone a much better marital partner. (not that I’d go back to being single!
lol) This is a faily common concept.
At the same time, my acceptance of my primary infertility prepared me. Your secondary infertility prepared you and really enjoying my life as a single woman prepared me for marriage.
I think you explained that quite well. It is a difficult thing to describe - although I think the marriage comparison might help only because more people can relate to that than the world of infertility.
Also, I would LOVE to read a book on the cultural experience of infertility. I think it would have been fantastic to be able to refer the people who loved me to a book like that!
I have a lot more thoughts on the entire blog entry but I suppose this is probably long enough! lol
What a wonderful post, Dawn! You need to write this book. Especially also there’s a book for us “others”, the ones who decided not to get into the trenches of painful/dangerous medical treatments. I hear so often that people don’t understand that I am still waiting just as eagerly, that I still hurt despite “having chosen to give up”. Not exhausting all the options of modern medicine before moving on != “giving up”.
A small part of the reason we chose to adopt without trying for pregnancy was that we hoped our children would know they were never our “next best” option. Now I wonder if we ever have a bio kid (very big if), the boys might think they aren’t good enough, that we need a bio kid to feel like our family is complete.
I would love to read more of your thoughts on faith and adoption. I like your explanation that your family needed *both* Madison and Jessica, and in that way all of you were meant to become family. However, I wonder about the whole “meant to be” thing. I would not want our kids to think that their first mom’s loss (or their own) was somehow God’s best possible idea… So far my thoughts are that I might hope to say to the boys, “We don’t know exactly how or why you came to our family, but we do know that you have never been unwanted, because we have always hoped for a wonderful son, and you are that son.” Because of our personal religious faith we might also say, “What happened to or around you and your birth family was never out of God’s control, and you were never out of reach of that love.”
As always, I don’t have perfect answers and I’m still sorting out my thoughts on this. If you don’t think it’s too inflammatory a topic, I would love to read your ideas (and those of others, too).
It’s not the individual choice that’s an issue for me; it’s the way our choices get dictated by other people’s ideas about what it means to be infertile.
Or not infertile enough, right? The crux of the cultural (including the medical community, I’m afraid!) prejudice agaisnt Secondary Infertility.
“At least you have ONE child.
This was beautiful, my friend. Write that book. I’ll excerpt it in my anthology.
I don’t have any children, as yet, but I am actively trying to get pregnant. However, since I was a little girl I’ve dreamed of a family that has both adopted and biological children in it. The reasons are complicated and I’ve only attempted to do justice to them once on a blog post - and not very well actually I have to say - I got a bit caught up in the overseas adoption issue (it was the week of Madonna and baby David). However, I intend to have another go at some point…
Recently, I ran into a minor hiccup in my own fertility (a rare complication associated with use of the coil as a method of contraception) and it reinforced for me that, if I didn’t manage to get pregnant, I would still be overjoyed to be a parent by adoption. I can’t imagine me carrying on to IVF or other types of treatment for that reason (although obviously I respect a couple’s right to proceed down that road). I am a regular reader of blogs in the adoption community and imagine I will be through out any pregnancy I may or may not have in the future. One day I hope I will adopt…
Great post - I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
1. i think you could market your book just like you said here - as a cultural look at infertility. what it does to women, motherhooed, etc. and purposely mention that this book is not about the nitty gritty of medical treatments.
2. the essay with a bio that ‘contradicts’ it might be best with an addendum of how you moved from where you were in the essay, to where you are now. or at least pointing out that it isnt a simple point a to point b connection (because otehrwise ppl might assume that and that would just be annoying)
I love the idea of a book on cultural views and impacts of infertility. There are so many books about “how to” as if getting pregnant were something like fixing your computer. I was overwhelmed to find a book on the emotional aspects, it was like my best friend for weeks. And much of that emotional stuff is very interrelated to cultural stuff: expectations, social interactions etc.
I agree with the comments that suggest if you write that epiphany article, you write a second companion piece explaining how you got to the present.
Myself… if I had conceived I would most likely never adopted. As my parents have no bio grandchildren, and I was very close to my extended family, and can trace our funny ears, etc back I would have liked to have a bio child. I also will always grieve that I cannot reproduce… sort of like a favorite plant whose seeds do not grow… I wish that I was the middle of a line of people in history, just a link along the way, rather than a dead end. But that is just how I feel.
When I was ttc, often people said “why don’t you just adopt?” as though it is some immediate solution. In my case it was not. I know that it is a different beast, having come from a family with adopted kids. We’re all siblings, but we don’t live the same things. I have never wondered where my body shape comes from, and I have never had to deal with being the only one of a different race in my family.
I took lots of time off after closing the door on conception. I needed to grieve that closed door, the dreams that would never be, the photos of grand and greatgrandparents I could never really hand down, the cultural history that will never be my child’s, the fact I will never know pregnancy and childbirth or breastfeeding.
And I needed to see if I could live as a childfree person. Maybe this was just some childhood dream I’d gotten stuck on and was no longer relevant.
But no, I cannot imagine my life without a child. And I don’t feel there is a child who is “meant to be” mine. I don’t feel the infertility is for a reason, or that I am glad I was infertile. I just feel I would be a good mom, and I do not want to die without having lived a goodly part of my life raising a child. The adoption came as a solution after the mourning was clearing up.
I don’t know what I will say about this when I have a child. I feel dishonest saying I wanted to adopt from square one. I feel dishonest saying I am glad I am infertile… but then maybe I will feel differently when I have my child in my arms finally. I cannot at this time imagine ever being happy not to have conceived… to me it feels like a death. Like I remarried (I like the one commenter’s marriage and single analogy) after losing a beloved spouse to death. If the first marriage had not ended, I would not have met and married the second spouse. It does not make one happy the first spouse died. One is still sad, and if one had had the choice, probably would have still been in the first marriage.
Anyways I am going on a lot in your comments, but this made me think a lot, and I wanted to share what I think and feel. Thanks for your blog.