I had a great day yesterday with cake and presents. Madison swore I wasn’t getting a cake and that the wrapped package in the ‘fridge was actually an old, dirty, leather boot for me to eat. I stomped around complaining about it all day while she wriggled with glee. Every once in awhile she’d sidle up to me and say, “So — excited about your old boot?”

I am also neck-deep in work because there’s a lot going on in front of and behind the scenes. Speaking of which, if you felt compelled to weigh in on Hollywood’s infertility secrets, I would dearly love you to here. If you’ve got a blog, feel free to take it back and play at home. We’ll be posting these every Tuesday but getting the buzz up early on is always hard. Nobody wants to be FIRST.

Personally I’m totally annoyed by the zillions of women who won’t just come clean and so make it seem like infertility is a shameful shameful secret. No it isn’t. It just is. Some of us have bodies that don’t work right. All of us (women) have bodies that eventually aren’t fertile anymore. What’s the shame in that? I can see not talking about it when you’re going through it and are raw and miserable but once you’ve resolved it however you’ve resolved it? We should do each other the favor of becoming voices of support.

My $.02. But then I am often shameless. (Ask my mother.)

“Whenever the employment rate is down, we get more calls,” says Robin von Halle, president of Alternative Reproductive Resources, an agency in Chicago where inquiries from would-be egg donors are up 30% in recent weeks — to about 60 calls a day. “We’re even getting men offering up their wives. It’s pretty scary.”

from Ova Time: Women Line Up to Donate Eggs for Money

Gamete donation lives in its own ethical morass. Personally I think if people choose to donate eggs or sperm, this is their choice. It gets sticky for me when I think about anonymous donation and the right for kids born from donated eggs or sperm to know about their genetic heritage. Since I have never donated eggs (between you and me, my eggs mostly suck) and my husband has never donated sperm (between you and me, his sperm is kinda lazy) I can’t speak to what sorts of counseling folks get ahead of time although I hear egg donors get more info than sperm donors seeing as how the process is more complicated and gives the clinic more access to the donor. But truthfully I haven’t given the set up all that much thought since pregnancy and genetic connection went by the wayside in my consideration pretty early on.

I am interested in the discussions about kids’ right to know since it in many ways mirrors the discussion in adoption. It sort of distills the open adoption records debate since it’s pretty much the same issue without the controversy of primal wound and other emotional arguments. Basically it comes down to whether or not we have the right to know our own histories. And if we do, how much of that history should belong to us — how many details ought we to have.

There’s a Donor Sibling Registry (this links to a video). Fertility docs think the registry is a good idea but it might cause a shortage of donors like has happened in Britain.

Here’s an interesting essay that talks about some of the unique challenges for donor kids, including the idea that they need access to other donor kids as they grow up so that they don’t feel weird or out-of-place. And another article that talks about the importance of half siblings.

I’ve got to get ready for a meeting so I have to stop here.

Sang-Shil Kim has a moving post explaining why sometimes we adoptive parents don’t do a whole lot of good with our fine platitudes. Still I think our platitudes are the best we can do. I can’t rewrite history and the truth is that first I tried to get pregnant. This may hurt Madison or it may roll off her back — I don’t know. It’s one of the things I can’t control for her.

I’m not abdicating responsibility here but I’m recognizing the limits of my influence. I can’t make things not hurt Madison and it seems developmentally appropriate for an adopted person to process his or her adoption through their parents’ narratives (both by birth and by adoption) and so at some point she likely will need to integrate my infertility story with her birth/adoption story.

As a parent, one of my challenges has been to find the careful balance between taking responsibility appropriately and taking on too much responsibility. For example, my infertility journey wasn’t such a terrific thing for Noah. I was preoccupied and depressed and Noah couldn’t understand why I wanted another kid when he was so happy being an only child. There’s an entry somewhere in my archives where he said to me, “Why am I not enough for you?” I know it’s not the same as an adoptee struggling with hard-core feelings of rejection but I’m saying that every parent has to understand the way their choices impact our kids AND the limits of our ability to address that impact. Ultimately, our kids need to figure out how to live with inconvenient truths. I don’t think it helped when I said, “Oh Noah, you’re just so swell that I need to have another one of you little ankle-biters around the house.” But it’s all I could say. It was true that I wanted another baby and that having “just” Noah didn’t fill this need in me. It was also true this wasn’t about him only how could I expect a 5-year old (I think he was five) to understand that?

Madison — like every adoptee — gets it coming and going. For one, she has to find a narrative that works to explain to herself why she is not with Pennie. She can go to Pennie for answers but she’ll need to find a way to make sense of it herself. For two, she has to find a narrative that works to explain to herself why I tried to get pregnant before turning to adoption. She can read my blog and watch me work through it in virtual time but that doesn’t mean it will answer all of her questions satisfactorily. This is one of those times where I can’t fix it.

I don’t abdicate my responsibility to her to help her process this but I do recognize that it’s her work to do and that even if I do the best job I can, I can’t control her feelings around it.

Eleven years ago I was recovering from a miscarriage (emotionally — physically I was a-ok) and it was mother’s day and little did I know it but I was going to find out I was pregnant with Noah in a couple of weeks. But for that day it was mother’s day and I was crying.

For a long time I had strong sense memories about being infertile. I could blink and feel exactly the way I felt at my worst and I’d have to hitch myself up by my logical bootstraps to stop feeling that way. But sometime in the last year or so it all just stopped and now I can’t really remember what it felt like. I mean, I can remember but I can’t feel it anymore. I don’t identify with infertility anymore. And this is the big reason I finally gave up on my book; it just doesn’t matter to me like it used to.

What does matter to me is our social values about motherhood, about not-motherhood, about womanhood as it is limited and defined by motherhood and how our cultural beliefs and formal policies shape our very personal experiences. This is the part of infertility that interests me and then you can see why adoption continues to fascinate me.

And this, too, is why I have real issues with the infertility industry — I know that for many of us, it’s the infertility industry defining our infertility experience and I believe that this is dangerous and unhealthy. It’s not the treatment per se — I’m not against individual women making individual choices about treatment — it’s the way that infertility treatment has become synonymous with infertility. That was going to be the point of the book and I hoped that I’d end up writing something that would help women make better sense of their choices. But, you know, I just don’t think I’d be successful. I’m too far away from the subject (emotionally) and I have too much antagonism with the ART industry.

But sometimes I think maybe I’d be able to wring an essay out of it. I’d hate to just throw away all of the research I’ve done.

So that’s my mother’s day entry. I kinda realize that my attitude towards mother’s day this year is “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

The second essay I’m working on (in fits and starts) is about how parenting Madison in this adoption taught me about parenting Noah, too. Right now I’m using her third birthday party juxtaposed against Noah’s third birthday to describe this but I’m not sure it’s working. Well, I know it’s not working yet but I’m not sure if using that to hang it all on is going to work or not.

I’m going to write it out some here.

See, with Noah I was much more clingy and I wanted everything to be just right. He also seemed more fragile than Madison does to me. I think this is a combination of him being my first but also of his high-need emotions and then he was very small for his age (and very bald) for a long time. (And his slanty-up blue eyes, which made him look sort of elfin and lost.) Anyway I first started to get a sense of my inability to do it all perfectly when I realized I was infertile. A huge part of resolving my infertility was giving up this need I had to give him a sibling in what I believed was perfect time. I wanted him to have a specific big brother experience and once I realized that I couldn’t give him that, I understood that he also didn’t need it. That it was ok that I couldn’t make his life perfect. (I’m not sure if that’ll be in the essay — it is, in fact, another essay but I haven’t been able to finish that one because originally it was about accepting his only child status and I don’t know how to explain how accepting his only child status was part of getting to adoption in a way that makes sense for the reader.)

Ok, back to Madison.

By the time Madison came along, I was no longer parenting for the future. Not that I don’t worry about getting them to adulthood and beyond (oh the teen years! how they haunt me!) but when I do worry about it, I know that I’m being self-indulgent and a little silly.

In a very profound way, which is what I’m trying to describe in this essay, I feel very much that I am holding Madison, in part, for Jessica. Not that I feel like a babysitter or “unreal” or any of that ridiculousness but that her birth family is part of her future and just like I’m parenting Noah for his future, I’m parenting Madison for hers, which means I’m parenting Madison for her birth family, too. Not for them to come and take her or for her to go away with them (unless she wants to and it would make sense) but for her to embrace them or not, to join them or not, but to make sense of them for herself. And I feel like I’m holding her and helping her until she can do it for herself so all of this open adoption eventually won’t have anything to do with me. And just like the first time Noah climbed into some other parent’s car for his first mom-free playdate, when I felt both weepy and proud, I anticipate feeling weepy and proud when Madison climbs into Jessica’s car and goes on her own way.

But I see now in a way I hadn’t before that good parenting is letting other people be important to your child. Madison (and Jessica) taught me that.

Writing it out here didn’t actually help all that much so I’m going back to a pressing work assignment instead of thinking on this.