As I prepared for our 200th(!!!) episode of the podcast, I realized that I hadn't completely shared a huge part of my story with you. You may already know that I’m an adoptive mom. Today, I’m going deeper and sharing my infertility and adoption story.
I sometimes talk about my journey as arriving through the back door of motherhood. In this episode, I’m talking about how I experienced infertility, why we chose adoption, and how that informed me as a mom, ultimately becoming a trauma-informed parent.
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My hope is that if you have experienced infertility, this episode gives a voice to your pain and a place for you to feel supported and loved. If you have not experienced infertility, I hope that hearing my story might help you have more understanding and compassion for your girlfriends or family members that are going through it.
After a few years of marriage (I married young at 22), it became clear to me that I really wanted to become a mom. Sometime in 2001 or 2002, my husband and I started trying to get pregnant. For the first few months, I didn’t think much of it when my period kept coming.
Six or seven months in, I wasn’t super concerned but thought it was a bit strange that I wasn’t pregnant yet. So I started the ovulation strips, the basal thermometer, and all those little at-home hacks to increase our chances.
A year went by, and I still wasn’t pregnant. During this time, I was pretty sad. In the beginning, I was so excited for my friends when they got pregnant. But as time went on and it became more evident that maybe it wasn't going to happen for us, I started to feel jealous, scared, and less than. It triggered insecurities and feelings from my childhood of not belonging.
At the one-year mark, we decided to go to the doctor and have some testing done. Our results showed that we would need some interventions if we wanted to get pregnant. The obvious answer at the time was IVF.
I knew a few people who were going through IVF, and I was hearing about how much it cost and how devastating it was if it didn’t work. So, we decided to consider ALL of our options.
After getting our test results, we weren’t closed off to the idea of adoption. In fact, I think there was a part of us that always sort of wanted to adopt. We just thought it would be in addition to our own biological kids.
The options were laid out to us in two paths: the medical route or the adoption route. At first, I told my husband that I wanted to pursue both at the same time.
As we started to look at adoption, I was clear on one thing. I did not want to adopt through foster care. I was so desperate for this child, and I wanted a baby that could be mine. While I now know that this isn’t the risk factor I thought it was, I was so afraid that our relationship would be insecure, that a birth mother could come back and take my child away.
So we decided on inter-country adoption. At the time, our main options were Russia, China, and Guatemala. We attended an adoption seminar and learned about the process, costs, and wait times. Russia seemed the most aligned for us in that we could have a baby in about nine months. It felt like the most natural timeline to me.
We realized pretty quickly that both IVF and adoption required a lot of time, money, and energy. We had to choose one.
When I have a big decision to make or I'm in a lot of emotional pain, I often end up on the shore, by the ocean. So after the seminar, my husband and I drove to Santa Monica, sat on the beach, and talked about it.
We both wanted to pursue adoption for different reasons. Kevin wasn’t super invested in having a biological child. And I wanted a sure thing. I didn’t want to go through round...
