It was at the end of last year (2014). I had come to a pretty good place in acceptance of a childfree life. I was comfortable with my life. But I knew hubbie wasn't in the same place. And because he wasn't, then we weren't. This wasn't a situation for one person to be okay and it's fine. We both had to be okay with a life without children.
Hubbie still had constant thoughts of "maybe we could adopt". I had already looked into adoption, had passed on the information to him, and felt that it just wasn't the right thing for us. But hubbie needed to look into for himself. I understood that.
So, off we went to a adoption meetings, reading through the material they sent us and listening to other women's stories of their international adoptions. By the end of it, we were both shaking our heads.
For so many reasons, international adoption was impossible for us. The most basic of those reasons was the highly rigid criteria for adoption and the years long waiting periods. We would be in our mid 50's before we received a child, if we ever did. And the cost! Enormous! With no guarantee of success. It was way beyond our means. And it was also beyond our emotional and physical means. The children that were possibly open to us were high needs, older children and after hearing the stories of their requirements, hubbie and I knew that it was just beyond us to be able to properly care for these children.
Our state here in Australia doesn't do adoption, only fostering, and that path as it turned out,
was also not open to us.
There were positives and negatives that came from our brief adoption journey experience.
The positive was that we were able to let go of that path and hubbie was able to move on from thoughts of adoption. It was a clearing. And he felt much better about it.
The negative was for me. From having been in a hard-earned place of acceptance, this search through the adoption process brought back all my maternal feelings. It was all back. The need, the desire, the dream of having a child. I wasn't happy to be back there again. Back in that place of heartache and lost dreams.
And a strong reason for that was that I had to be the one to makes things happen. I was happy for hubbie to look into adoption and I encouraged him to do so. But he wasn't able to do it himself and I had to take it on, or that never ending "what if" would have been there forever. It's one thing to sit back and go with the flow of the journey. Quite another to be the active participant in making it happen.
But that's the way it was and I had to deal with it. I took the approach that I had gotten through it all before and was much stronger and more capable of dealing with things. I knew that I would recover. I had done so before. In the end, I know that I will be alright.
So the adoption journey ended and we were left with just one last possibility for a child - a donor egg.
No comments:
Post a Comment