I'm so excited to post my first co-written blog post! I teamed up with expectant adoptive mom, Stephanie of Blessed to Be. I'll let Stephanie start us off :)
It's easy to think there
are huge differences between becoming a parent through conception and becoming
a parent through adoption. The big obvious one is that women who can get
pregnant carry their child with them for nine months, something adoptive mamas
don't experience. Some people will even go so far as to say that adoptive
parents aren't 100% parent because they haven't experienced the physical and
emotional pains of a pregnancy. In their opinion, only pregnancy turns a woman
into a real mom. But are we really all that different? Are our journeys that
unalike?
Sure, we didn't carry that
little one around with us for nine months, but we do still have lots in common.
We at least experience many of the same feelings of excitement,
freak-outedness, disappointment, heartache, impatience, and joy, just to name a
few. Ok, so maybe our hormones aren't making us cry over the latest episode of
The View or causing a serious banana split craving at two in the morning, but
many of the emotions are identical.
To prove our point, we teamed up to write this post about
how surprisingly similar the domestic adoption process and pregnancy really
are. Even though we are a bit more familiar with adoption, we know enough about
TTC (trying to conceive) and all the pregnancy stuff our friends and family
members have experienced that we think we know what we're talking about. :)
And now we present to you
8 ways in which domestic adoption and pregnancy are similar:
Deciding to show your
profile // Deciding to try to get pregnant -- Stephanie
The moment you give your
adoption agency the YES to show your profile, the whole game changes. You go
from thinking, "Yeah, we'll be parents someday," to, "Yikes, we
could be parents so soon!" It's a big shift and I remember feeling the
same way when John and I decided it was time for us to start trying to get
pregnant. In both situations, there's tons of excitement, a few fears here and
there, and lots of nerves overall. In adoption you worry about things like,
"Will this birthmom and baby be 'the one'? Will anyone ever like our profile? If she does pick us, will she stick with her plan?" When you're
trying to get pregnant, your worries are more like, "Will this cycle be
'the one'? Will we ever get pregnant? If we do get pregnant, will our little
one stick?" While the questions are slightly different, the feelings are
absolutely the same. It's the moment you go from, "We're not quite ready
to be parents," to, "LET'S DO THIS!" and that's quite an
exciting, super-scary, life-altering jump.
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| Stephanie and John's profile that will be presented to birth mothers |
Waiting to hear back from
your agency while your profile is being shown // The two week wait -- Stephanie
If you've ever tried to
get pregnant, you know about that dreaded two week wait, those two weeks
between ovulation and when you'd normally get your period, when you aren't sure
if you're pregnant but are so hopeful you are. During the adoption process,
after you decide to go ahead and show your profile to a birthmom, you
experience quite the wait too. While the wait to hear back from your agency may
not take exactly two weeks, the feelings of impatience and the constant day
dreaming of what your future will be like with this possible child are
absolutely just as present. It's also easy to waiver between extreme hope and
utter despair, from, "This must be it!" to "This will never
happen for us," in a matter of minutes. Oh, the waiting. Both trying to
get pregnant and trying to adopt can have plenty of waiting involved, for sure.
It's probably God's way of teaching us all patience, 'cause He knows we'll need
it once those kiddos do come along.
Finding out you didn't
match // Getting your period -- Stephanie
When you get the call from
your agency that you didn't match with the birthmom and baby, it's very similar
to the disappointment you feel when holding a negative pregnancy test in your
hand or experiencing another cycle day 1. It's just one big bummer, one big
case of dreams deferred yet again. I've had many ugly cries over getting my
period and I've also had a bunch over not matching with a little guy we were
almost sure we'd match with. "Why am I such a failure?" and,
"Why is this happening to us?" are common thoughts in both adoption
and TTC, especially when things don't work out the way you think they're going
to. Yet, in both situations, you have to continue to find hope, even when it's
the last thing you want to do. We pick ourselves back up, rely on family and
friends to carry us through, and hold our heads mostly high as we try for
another cycle or show our profiles once again. It's what makes all us
infertiles and all us waiting-to-adopters even stronger than we could ever imagine.
Finding out you did match
// Getting a BFP! -- Lisa
Whether you are sitting
waiting for that little plus sign on a pregnancy test or jumping every time the
phone rings, nothing quite compares to the news that you are officially
anticipating the arrival of your child. When we found out we were in a match, I
seriously needed to be scraped off the ceiling. No matter how much I would tell
myself not to get too excited, I would find myself planning the next year of my
life with a little one in tow. I can still clearly remember myself pacing the
room as I spoke with our counselor, getting all the information. My hands were
shaking, my heart pounding, and thoughts were racing through my head. It really
doesn't matter whether you physically become pregnant or you are matched with a
child, that initial excitement, jitters, and feelings of your stomach lifting
up into your chest is such an incredible high.
Adoption anxiety //
Morning sickness and cravings -- Stephanie
When we were waiting to
hear from our agency about a potential match, I experienced some serious
anxiety. It was so bad I could feel it in my throat. Have you ever experienced
that kind of anxiety? It's the kind that makes you feel like your heart could
just explode at any second. The kind that makes it nearly impossible to eat
anything. The kind that makes your mind race, your stomach turn, your heart
beat way too fast. It doesn't feel good at all. While I've never experienced
morning sickness or pregnancy cravings, and I'm sure they're probably a bit
worse than the anxiety I felt, it was still a very physical pain that I
couldn't control. I've never been that much of a ball of nerves in my entire
life! The only relief for me was finally hearing from our agency. Even though
it wasn't the news we wanted to hear, it was still a relief to have an answer,
to have a clearer picture for our future. As for cravings and morning sickness,
sometimes the only relief is getting past a certain point in the pregnancy or
delivering that baby. In both adoption and pregnancy, I'm sure all of us
future-parents would agree: the physical pain that can accompany the waiting
(or baby growing) is just plane lame, but in the end, worth it! More on that
later, though.
Meeting the birth parents
// Your first ultrasound -- Lisa
I would compare a match
meeting (meeting the birth parent(s)) to going in for an ultrasound. In fact,
sometimes this may be a time that you get to see an ultrasound picture. This is
the point when everything becomes real. Just like I'm sure it can be hard to
believe you are pregnant before showing and before hearing that little
heartbeat, I feel like a match doesn't really feel like it's actually happening
until there is a face to the name on all that paperwork. It's so easy in
adoption to start to envision the worst case scenario. "Maybe they won't
like us when they actually meet us. What if I say the wrong thing and
everything goes horribly wrong? What if they change their minds and we lose the
possibility of bringing home our little one? What if the situation is scarier
either medically or through circumstances than we expected?" Those are
just a few of the millions of fears that have danced through my head before a
match meeting.
BUT just like that moment
of hearing a healthy heartbeat, a successful match meeting brings all that
excitement back again. For me, these experiences have been love at first sight.
Just hearing about the baby through the initial presentation of information
brings about that automatic mother's love in me. I have also experienced a
similar feeling in my relationship with the birth parents. We have been blessed
to really connect with the birth parents we have been matched with, especially
Nate's birthmom. I feel like we have that common bond of a mother's love, and
as a woman I feel like we can truly appreciate the incredible gift and
sacrifice this woman is making. For us, match meetings have been very positive
experiences that have eased our fears and connected us to our child in a very special way, very much like an ultrasound would in a pregnancy.
Grief in adoption // Grief
in pregnancy -- Lisa
One thing that I never
really thought about going into adoption was the potential of a loss. Yes, I
knew that an adoption could fall through, but I figured that chances of it
happening were pretty slim. Unfortunately, that's not the case. In adoption, there
can be several different instances in which we experience loss, whether it is
through not being chosen by a birth parent or a birth parent choosing to
parent.
Stephanie and I were a bit
hesitant on how to approach the topic of loss since it is such an emotional and
personal experience. Sadly, we can experience losses through both pregnancy and
adoption. Those losses are unique, but they are losses. Most if not all
mothers, no matter how they are expecting, fear these losses. For me, it was my
absolute worst fear, to experience what our agency calls a "change of
heart" in which the birth parents choose to parent their child. Even
though we do not experience the physical presence of our child in the womb,
there is immediately an emotional presence. No matter how much an agency does
to prepare you, a loss still hits you like a brick.
Unfortunately, I feel like many of
these losses through miscarriage or adoption loss still aren't really talked
about. For me, I felt like it was very much a silent struggle. I felt like I
could be upset, but shouldn't be for very long. I don't want to directly
compare a pregnancy loss to an adoption loss because each is unique for every
person and situation. I just think it's important that we recognize the gravity
of these losses. These children are imprinted on our hearts whether we knew
them only in our hearts, carried them for a short time, or held them in our
arms. For me, I'm past the grief. It doesn't impact my love for my sweet son by
any means, but I will always have a little place in my heart for that sweet
little baby who was almost physically ours.
Forgetting all the pain of
the adoption process // Forgetting all the pain of childbirth the moment you
hold your forever baby in your arms -- Lisa
I always hear mothers talk
about how they forgot about the intensity of the pain of childbirth once their
child is in their arms. The love for your child just kind of takes over and
wipes away the memory of the awful pain. The beautiful thing about adoption is
that the same phenomenon happens. No, you don't entirely forget the pain of the
wait (and don't particularly look forward to it again in the future), but
suddenly it all was worth it. Every last tear I cried and moment of prayer
begging on my knees was just a small sacrifice for this little one. The pain of
not being matched, an adoption falling through, and months of not hearing a
single thing immediately subsided when I laid eyes on my sweet little boy.
Being with him brings me so much joy, a joy that overshadows all the pain on
the road to get here. And that is why going in again for another adoption
journey doesn't sound so bad. In fact, it sounds like a great idea!
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| Ready to take our sweet son home from the hospital! He was sooo worth it :) |
We hope that after reading
this post, all you adoptive or future-adoptive parents now feel as though you
can reclaim some of the stuff we sometimes feel we missed out on by not being
able to conceive or carry our child. And if you're a parent who only knows
parenthood through conception, we hope this post has shown how our different
paths to parenthood are actually alike in many ways. May we all be blessed by
the joys of parenthood and always find support in one another.
Thanks to Stephanie for inviting me to join her in writing this post! It was so much fun :) Here's a little more about Stephanie. I recommend you check out her blog. Also, send up a few prayers that she is matched with her sweet little one soon!
Stephanie is a red-headed Catholic originally from the North who now lives in Memphis, aka the South. Marrying a Southern boy will do that to ya. She and her sweet husband, John, enjoy going on trips and adventures, eating new foods, playing nerdy board games, and watching nerdy shows. They’re home study approved and waiting with a small local agency now to match with their forever baby. Check out Stephanie’s blog Blessed to Be for more details on their adventures in Catholicism, infertility, adoption, and their crazy awesome life.
