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.