going zen

Today I had to leave the house for the first time since last Saturday, seriously I have been in our home for 120 hours.  No field trips for my daily 4PM  ice coffee, like any other home office day. No going down to get the mail just for a break.   Although I have spoken to a couple of the doormen asking them to send the Fedex man up for outgoing profile pickups,  our two morning guys have asked my husband if I am locked in a closet or tied up.  Other than that strangely enough I don't think anyone has really noticed my lack of comings and goings.  In case anyone who may stumble across this blog is wondering; just for the record, I do shower every day, but no makeup, and my uniform is Splendid or Prana sweat pants and a Gap tank top.   

Back to why I left the house.   I needed some elective surgery, (Is it elective if you ultimately have to have it done but you just choose now?) and the timing was right with needing to be home for the next few weeks.   The surgery was not cosmetic in any way, shape or form.  I may be an "older mom-to-be" but not ready for that yet, though I never say never.  So I gave my sister notes and an abbreviated training on how to answer the "hotline" if anyone calls, left her here at 7 AM with a full pot of coffee and took my Mom with me to the hospital.  In my brain I had the entire day worked out: my surgery was scheduled for 9 AM, 1 hour in the O.R., 1 hour in recovery and then 1 hour sitting up and learning to walk on crutches...home by Noon, back on the hotline hopefully not zonked on oxycodone.   "The best laid plans...yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Surgery was an hour delayed, recovery was busy so home by two and one missed phone call. Arghhhh.  Sis said a man phoned, asked for me and the conversation went like this:

  Sis: "I am Sis,  her sister, she had to step out for a bit, but she is going to be so excited     you called, but I would love to speak with you about Lisa and Hubby, they are so excited 

to have a child. 

Male caller: "I will call her later."

Sis:  "She will be back soon, I would love to speak with you about my sister and her husband for a bit."

Male caller: I am busy now, I will call her later."

It is 11 PM now and he didn't phone back.  I did hit redial and call him back as I was advised is OK.  I said, "Hi, this is Lisa, someone called about our ad today"....click.   I am going Zen.  You know the whole control what you can control belief.  My brain keeps asking, "what if that were the one? What if the other girl changes her mind or picks someone else?   Why was my surgery late?  Why? What if? What can I do?  It just keeps going in an endless loop in my head.   I am trying to go Zen. 

Knitting content: Working on glimmer shrug from Knitty.com in Blue Sky Alpaca skinny organic, but my brain is fuzzy from the good stuff so it is two rows forward one row back.

Where we are now

So one of the things that can be different in using an attorney vs. an agency is in some cases you have to answer your 800 number calls yourself.  As our attorney put it, "it is a luxury to be able to pay someone else with experience in this to stay home and answer the phones for you."  Having said that, here I am on Day 5 of what will likely be pretty much 3 weeks of staying close to home, or not leaving the house, waiting for the phone to ring and have the caller be someone who is pregnant and does want to put his/her child up for adoption.  

Thus far our calls have been a couple of hang ups and wrong numbers, which I am hoping are women working up the nerve to speak, a couple of real weirdo's, and many,  about 5 women or so asking us if would like a surrogate or someone to donate eggs.   Three women who are actually pregnant right now have called and we have sent our profile to them.  

So here I sit on Day 5...I have plenty of "To Do's" in the house but not really able to focus yet on getting them done....funny how that works...all this time stretched out before me, with plenty of projects to do...well,  you know how it goes sometimes.  

edited later today: finally a connection;  a young woman who seems to know that adoption is the best choice for her and I really like her.   Amazing the places you end up....it never is where you thought  you would.  funny.

how we got here

After 3 years of fertility treatments, I refuse to call them infertility treatments: seems like we are already predicting the outcome, my husband and I decided upon adoption to create our family. Just for the record it was 3 years, 2 miscarriages, a few therapy sessions and a how do you do weekend with an adoption agency  that helped us finally arrive at this choice. 

Since we weren't able to get pregnant immediately I always knew adoption was a very real option for me.  I knew I wanted to be a parent and it didn't matter whether there was a genetic link or not.   Although we knew by the end of last summer we were going to adopt there were a few detours along the way.  They say, "Oh, once you decide to adopt, you'll see, you will get pregnant."  Well they were right; last summer when we had pulled the plug on most fertility treatments, we were still on the donor egg list, just in case, I found myself  pregnant. Unfortunately after 10 weeks she couldn't stay any longer.   

The funny thing about fertility treatments is it does become a bit of a contest: with yourself, your body and the odds, once you start it is hard to stop and start actually pursuing other options...add what appears to have been a potentially successful pregnancy to the mix and it really leaves you reeling.   It took us a little while to move past that and start the adoption process.  

Scheduling the home study for some reason was the easiest first step for me to take vs. sending our 12k to an agency or sitting with an attorney to map out the process.  I think I kind of fooled myself into the home study because we were not prepared when Diane, our social worker, showed up.   Now, I admit to being a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of gal, I wrote term papers at the last minute and to this day will work on slides for a presentation the night and morning before the presentation, but I hadn't even reviewed the paperwork my husband and I needed to fill out before the home study.   Truth be told when she asked for our "questionnaires" my husband looked questioningly at me across the table and I had no answer.  We were off to a great start!  We each had to fill in a three or four page questionnaire while Diane sat there drinking coffee and eating Trader Joes animal crackers.   We hadn't even thought to get some breakfast pastries or a bagel for the occasion.    

Anyway, the home study hasn't little to do with the actual home...she glanced around to make sure there weren't any open gun cabinets or power saws lying around and that there would be room for a crib and little person, but she mainly focused on the content of the questionnaires: our family backgrounds, our previous relationships, how we communicated etc. etc.  I learned something new about my husband that day, we were disciplined in different ways as children, my sister and I got a smack on the bottom with a wooden spoon or something like that and sent to our rooms, he was sent to his room, followed by a discussion later.  His family was light years ahead of mine in child-rearing!   One of the more interesting questions Diane asked was "What do you plan to tell your child about their adoption?".   In other words why their biological parents gave them up.   I will tell you I didn't have the perfect answer at that time, but have since worked on it.  

Like almost everyone else pursuing domestic adoption,  the first few choices are open or closed and attorney vs. agency.   We chose open because we want to be able to give our child all the answers they may or may not eventually need.  We chose an attorney because it seemed to me like the shortest distance between two points, meaning it may be slightly quicker than using an agency.   I am completely aware that may or may not be true as, but to me it seemed like a little more control or contact than waiting on an agency list with many other waiting couples and families.  Maybe I was afraid we wouldn't stack up well when placed in a larger pool...one of the many fears we have had along the way.  

Three months after choosing our attorney, our paperwork including fingerprinting, tax returns, reference letters from friends, employment verification etc were filed with our state.  Most of this could have been accomplished in a little less time, but life does still go on around us and there were competing priorities for us this past spring, which took precedent.   It is OK though we are where we are supposed to be.  

During this same period we composed a 20 plus page profile of our lives, families and friends and I must say:  I would totally choose us if I could!   Creating your profile made us  seem slightly more perfect than we are, but it is an interesting exercise...I realized just how full and rich our life already is and that we do have a lot to give and more to gain in having a child.