continued

i pooped out last time and never talked about all that did change in the past year.  a key friendship in our lives, a friendship i thought we would grow old with changed pretty much immediately after A was born and has slowly and might i add painfully, deteriorated over the past year and recently ended and i am not sure, with the exception of one incident, what i could or would have done differently.  

before A was born we socialized with these women and their children all  the time.   during the winter they would come to our old apartment for sunday dinner, i would talk to one of them almost every night when she drove home from work.  when A was born one of them came and stayed with me while we waited for the interstate compact.   A's dada is godfather to the eldest daughter.   we babysat their children and guarded them, worried for them as if they were our own.     we also reveled in the fact that all our children would have unique stories and they would have each others as peers and support as they grew up.

for the first 6 weeks after A was born she had  reflux, during which time she cried every night for hours and hours.  needless to say this made being a brand, spanking new parent even more difficult and worrisome.   even once she was treated and was a happier more rested little monkee we had made a decision since it was december in nyc not to cart her around out to restaurants and such at night, nor did we entertain as much as we did prior.    over time as her sleep habits became more regular  we pretty much changed our lives to work with her schedule and worked to protect her bedtime.    at the same time since we live in a nyc apartment it made entertaining somewhat difficult especially a family of four so needless to say we saw our friends less.

the frustration on their part built up over time until finally there were discussions and arguments, the main gist of which were  "you have changed, this is not at all like what we expected it to be like when you had a child, too much has been lost, you act like you don't trust us" etc. etc.   i completely agree things have changed, but i never thought this is the way it would be forever, i never thought it would eventually be the end of the friendship. 

ugh, even writing about it exhausts me physically and emotionally.  i have to finish another time.

the year since

while reflecting on all the changes that led us to A, i have also had an acute awareness of all the things and relationships that have changed since our girl was born.  no matter how many times i have babysat for other peoples children, and no matter how much i may have been warned: nothing, i mean nothing prepared me for the constant worry  i would have for my own child.  i worry all day, everyday about how she is, how she will grow up and how will i be a good parent to her.   

before

i have spent a lot of time reflecting lately...thinking about the future, the past and how different life has been since my little girl came along.     i don't know if i have written much about this but the 18 months before A was born  were filled with a lot of changes, many of them loss of one kind or another.   prior to june 07 the obvious loss had been the creeping realization that we may not conceive a biological child, at which point we started considering donor eggs.   after all that we went through to use our donor we did not conceive with the first cycle and i can truly say i was devastated.  all in the universe seemed aligned with her for this to be "the one". 

I didn't want to leave the house or do anything for weeks.  on round 2  with one of the frozen embryos, i did get pregnant; miscarriage #1 followed.  We took the summer off to rest and heal.  

august  (07) i started to train for a 1/2 marathon that my company was a major sponsor of to benefit breast cancer research and patients.  i loved being able to run and train again without the hinderance of an ivf cycle and the constant worry of trying to get pregnant.   long story short, while training i became pregnant, stopped running and at 10 1/2 weeks (october 07)  lost the pregnancy and needed a few months to rest and recuperate.

december 07 my mom who has survived breast and lung cancer was hospitalized for two weeks with double pneumonia, not a good thing when you are already down one half of a lung.   Then a beloved family pet of 17 years passed away.  Putting that kitty to sleep was one of the saddest things i have ever witnessed in my whole life.  

in february of 08 we met our adoption attorney and started to compose our profile.  a few weeks later at the end of april, while couch shopping at abc carpet and home on a beautiful sunday afternoon we received a call from my mom that my dad, who none of us had seen in a long time, had a heart attack and was in the hospital in the bronx.  he never left the hospital again.  i was there when he coded, asleep in the cicu waiting room.  i still regret my choice not to sleep in his room that night.  the gift in this was that we had 21 days, while he  slowly faded, to reconnect and say all the things we had not said in a long, long time and some things never at all..like "i'm sorry".  

it was a really long year.

end of summer

i am so excited it is almost the end of August for so many reasons...

1. i love, love, love fall...boots, sweaters, turtlenecks and jeans and things i have knit
2. warm breezes start at night that slowly drop a degree or two each week and  give way to cooler breezes, leaves changing and the smell of fall and colder weather in the air.
3. we are finally having our kitchen updated starting friday
4. we had a great summer
5. most importantly, my daughters first birthday is rapidly approaching and i get to celebrate her life and the incredible  gift i have been given in being her mom.
   

it has been so wonderfully busy here...A started to crawl, wave bye bye, hold her bottle, pull herself to standing in her crib and have a wee bit of a temper all in the same week.      my work travel has been hectic to say the least, 6 nights away between June and July and another 8 in the next 5 weeks.   thank God for my aunt and my mom who sit for A when i am away.  no one besides family has ever put my little girl to bed and that luxury makes me very happy as a working mom...although leaving her never gets easier.  among all my other new found fears i developed upon becoming a mother is that her first words will be "mommy go bye-bye" or "bye-bye momma".  

wow

I can't believe it has been four months since I have posted....it's OK though, I don't think anyone except my husband reads so it is probably fine. Anyway interestingly enough my last post was March 9, one month to the day before our finalization and I think I may have flipped out just a wee bit as that day approached. I absolutely had no reservations in my heart about anything happening to disrupt our family but I still was a little weirded out as the day approached. So bless my husbands heart he agreed to go see a counselor with me from Spence Chapin who works with families pre and post adoption, although this was mostly my issue he did attend for 4 sessions.

I am not sure what I was really worrying about but what I went in to discuss was how my Birthmom,  was going to process the finalization, and how we would build the relationship without the pre-defined agency contacts of our first six months as a family.   I was truly worried about her grieving process and how to ask her about how we should communicate moving forward.  

Anyway, several sessions and one very supportive husband later I was feeling much better and enjoyed the permission to focus on my family and not worry so much about the moving forward part as it would  inevitably define itself...which it is doing.   

So that accounts for 6 weeks of my time off from this blog. 

you never think it is going to be you

I remember the first IVF cycle. I was so sure it would be my one and only; because, well of course I would get pregnant straight away... it was always that way for me. Not "always that for me" as in things came easily, not at all, but rather "always that way for me" as in always some work and then I was successful. Success may not look like what I thought it would at the onset, but it was success and I was always happy. I was always a late bloomer why would this be any different. I didn't really choose a career until I was almost 28 years old, prior to that I graduated college worked in a gym and was a bartender, but when I did finally get a career it was a good one; it has been my career for 17 years now, and it has been rewarding. I didn't meet my husband until I was 38 years old, married at 41. So of course I thought "late bloomer". I am not going to get pregnant on my own but will have to do this thing (IVF) and I will reap my just reward of pregnancy and family.. Right?? By the way, the fact that I was 41 years old and trying to get pregnant didn't really scare me all that much until my doctor kept telling me it was my age that was the only problem.

After the first cycle failed, I was pretty sure I needed to meditate more (TM), yeah, that had to be part of the answer. I had to make sure I was visualizing enough. Most importantly, I needed to get up, dust myself off, go for a run and get right back on that horse. Perseverance has always worked for me, so I just needed to make sure I didn't cry "uncle". Well, 4 stimulations, 4 retrieivals, 4 transfers, 4 not pregnant phone calls, 1 donor, 2 donor transfers, two more not pregnant phone calls, two of the top ten IVF centers in the US and oh yes one pregnancy all by myself, while training for a half marathon, later I wasn't crying uncle, but I was willing to walk away and pursue my goal of being a mom and not just being pregnant.

There were so many points along the way where I could not believe that this was happening to me. I was unable to imagine what part of the formula, surely there had to be one, that I didn't have right. Was I not sitting on the couch enough? Should I stop sitting and just lie down for two days instead? I was dumbfounded this was going to be the only thing where success in some way shape or form did not arrive. And now being 44 soon to be 45 bothered me.

i got nothin'

At least not anything major that is.    I had an interview this week with a very well known adoption agency to join an adoptive parents support group.  The group is currently full, only 11 members at a time, so I am wait-listed.  In the course of the conversation with the nice lady she asked what it was I particularly wanted to get out of being part of an adoptive parents support group.  My response was something to the effect, "i want to meet other families similar to ours and hear how they have processed or are processing being a family.  Specifically around talking to your child about adoption, what does the birthmom relationship resemble in their family after the finalization and as time goes on and so on and so on.   The nice lady suggested I/my husband and I perhaps have a few private sessions with one of the counselors on staff as a way of heping us decide what are the right answers for us as a family.  

I, always one to seek advice and then decide what is best for me, thought this was a grand idea, but said right then and there to the nice lady, I don't know that my husband will go right away if at all.   Well, my guy, always reticent, to put it mildly, to seek advice, said, "great idea I will definitely go."   

Go figure.

my abandonment issues

 A few weeks ago I was at my mother's house and she  heard me saying  to Baby AM that she had beautiful hands like her birthmother.  I guess this particular incident was  one of several times she had heard me mention my daughters birthmom to AM during the course of daily chatter.  Now for the record my mom is 68 years old and obviously from a generation where  discussion of children being adopted and their first parents was more or less taboo.  At least that has been my experience in our family; I have two second cousins, both of whom are adopted and as grown men never knew they were adopted.  The surviving brother is now at least 5o years old.   Funny, I can remember my cousins talking about these boys adoptions as teenagers.

SO, back to this day.  After a few minutes, I can't remember whether the baby had fallen asleep or not yet, but my Mom asked, "Is it appropriate to mention T to Baby A so often?"   Now my  Mom has been intimately involved in every step of our adoption and I can not count the number of times I have said that my desire is for my daughter to be raised in a home and family where her birthmom is spoken of with love and respect.  I have also said a gazillion times we will always use language that is positive around how we came to be her family and there will not be secrets.  We have also discussed how I was practicing for the day my sweetie does understand what her momma is saying so that it will always be a natural part of our conversations.  Needless to say I was surprised at her question.

I waited a second and thought really carefully about how I wanted to answer.  For the record I was not the least bit upset by her question.  I started by reminding my Mom how it was important for Baby A to be raised in a home where.....see above.  I also said, "I want her to know she was not 'given up' for adoption.  I don't want her to ever feel abandoned or alone." I continued by reminding my Mom that, "I know what it is like to have a parent abandon his family, even when he was physically in the home, and I know that as a teenager, a young woman and even somedays now all I want is to know that I was important to Daddy and that he loved us all those times he wasn't there."  Needless to say I was becoming pretty emotional, and I see now that I was imagining in the future my daughters pain to be like mine and I wanted to try and  save her any pain or feelings of being left or abandoned.   Clearly, I can not save my girl any of these feelings or thoughts, so really all my practicing may not yield what I wish for her anyway.  

Now that it is a few weeks later and "the man" (our family counselor) has pointed out to me that perhaps I was really talking about myself.  I now realize that clearly I can not save my girl any of those thoughts or feelings.  However, I doubt I will stop  trying.   Another fun byproduct of our discussion is it has made me think about my Dad, his life, our lives and his death all over again.  He died last May, but I have been so busy in my joy I don't think I am done grieving all  that he really was and all that was not over the years.  

i filled out a survey and was quoted....

in this months issue of Adoptive Families magazine!  OK, a silly dopey little quote on how we saved money during our adoption process.  Kind of embarrassing once you see it in print, but hey when you are in the thick of it and want to make sure you have all the resources you need for your child, you try to cut corners...right?  

While I am on the subject of being quoted, I was contacted by a freelance journalist for same magazine who is writing an article and wanted to know if she could take another quote of mine for the article.  This one not nearly as silly as the first though.  I had answered some questions about what we had done to create our family prior to choosing adoption.  I had used donor eggs and made some comments in my answers about how having a donor paved our path even more towards adoption.   I will admit I am  a person who takes great pains to make sure my communications are understood and will frequently punctuate with "does that make sense?" to make sure I am understood.  Having said that I have some trepidation about being quoted for an article with a mostly unknown topic, except for the fact it is in AF magazine, as I take what messages I give about fertility and adoption very seriously.   Not sure when the article will appear but I will let you know how it works out.

on needles: hooded pullover for AM in koigu kersti multi, (looks like juicyfruit gum colors), it seems a little big and likely to fit her this fall.   still finishing the Zara butter yellow blanket.

bonding and the first giggle

Some folks told hubby and I that it would be easier for me to bond first, because it was woman's instinct, and that T's bond wouldn't come until maybe a few months later when she began interacting with him. Interestingly enough that advice or prediction came from both parents with an adopted child and parents with a bio child.  At the time I think it was comforting to us both to know that maybe we weren't expected to immediately fall in love with this little stranger.   Friends told us that in the first weeks their bio-child was home and crying they would wonder, "when are her parents going to come and get her."    T and I have talked about this a bit and pretty much have the same ideas.   But, in my perception he bonded with her the minute she needed him. The minute her first cry in that hotel room came and he gave her a bottle, if I am not mistaken the first bottle he has ever given. The minute he tried to make her comfortable in that dopey moses basket we had lugged all the way from new york and she refused to sleep in it, the minute she wanted a a heartbeat and warm skin next to her body and he could smell her was the minute he started to bond.  Is that bonding?  I would imagine it is at least the start of it, no matter how frightening and daunting the responsibility seems to be.

Of course now the bond is different, I wouldn't say stronger, I just think like parents of bio children it grows and is not greater in emotion at any given point. The loss of that child would be devastating at any point and not worse because they were older. Does that make sense?

I think the difference is now she is bonded with us. She has of course known our voices and scents for quite some time now, but now she looks for us in a room and settles when it is one of her immediate family holding or consoling her. She has had nothing but huge smiles for us...unless hungry or ready for a nap...for at least a month now, but today when she was just about ready for a nap and we were getting to hit the streets for a long walk for that nap, I started singing bye bye love and dancing to it as well with some erratic voice and tone changes and my girl giggled...it was a joyful throaty little gurgle that ended with a bit of a squeak.   She seemed as surprised as we were that she could do that with her voice, since she only learned last week that she could "yell".  We of course couldn't stop singing that song to make her do it again so Daddy could get it on video. It was the highlight of my month...that first giggle.

the things people say

I was away last week at a work meeting and of course since it was my first meeting back from Family Leave, everyone wanted to see baby pictures and ask how things were. Many folks at the meeting knew that we had been trying to create our family for the past few years and most by now had known we were adopting....except for one woman, who at lunch after looking at my little, 15 photo, brag book, said, "I remember when you were pregnant." My boss was actually the first one to respond and said, "uhhhh, noooo", trying ever so delicately to cut her off before it got worse, when I just blurted out, "No, I was never pregnant with AM." Well you could have knocked her over with a feather, but I didn't know how to handle that one. I have grown accustomed to folks in the building, who have said, "I don't remember you being pregnant", or distant friends who upon receiving their Christmas Card/Annoucement said, "wow, we have been out of touch... but someone who had remembered I was pregnant!!??? OK, I know I put on a little weight trying to get pregnant but seriously....THAT MUCH??? One of my partners said, that should be incentive to get out of bed and get on the treadmill. Thank you for that AB. I was pretty nonplussed by the comment and had a good laugh telling some of my friends about it.

The other side of the week, had me being knocked over by a feather; in a conversation with my bosses boss who could be a tough guy to communicate with.  I pretty much accosted him in the bar and demanded he see photos of my little girl...no I wasn't drinking. He asked where AM was from and I said Texas, where interestingly enough we were (1 mile from where we awaited our interstate compact), and then he asked if we were going to keep in touch with the birth family. I of course replied, "yes, we currently send photos and a letter each month through our agency, but we also speak to our BM and have long-term plans to stay in touch and have AM meet her, etc. etc. Well, it was my turn to be knocked over with a feather, when he responded that his sister had placed a child for adoption and said, "to this day she knows it was the best decision for her and her daughter because she would never have been able to care for her and raise her at that time." I have to tell you, it gave me such a good feeling to know that somewhere in the sorrow and grieving of placing a child into a chosen family to raise, this woman had found some sort of peace with her choice. I like that happy sounding ending.   

Funny, the things people will say and tell you when you have adopted your child. We could of course do another whole post on the things people ask, but we can save that for another day.

Finally, I have knit AM her first piece of mommy-knit.  It is something I have knitted  for everyone I really like who has had a baby.  I knit her a baby blanket from Vogue Baby Blankets, in a pretty butter yellow. She look so sweet and beautiful in yellow. It will be done this week and I have a cute little hoodie pullover from Artyarns I will start next week.

three months

I can't believe AM is three months already. In some way it feels like she was born just yesterday and yet I can't remember when she wasn't here, when I couldn't smell her and lift her from the bassinet. My friend was one of those amazingly organized Mom's who wrote each of her daughters a letter every month for their first year of life and kept them in a box for her. Well, I have missed that boat by two months, but I sure can strive for a letter every 3 months, for the first year. Maybe that is what I should do after this.