The Way to Widget (part I)
February 9th, 2006
I have never really written about adopting Widget and being an adoptive mother. Bits and pieces while we were in the process, mostly on the adoption forums I visit, but never from beginning to present in a cohesive whole.
I think first, though, I need to write about what led us to adoption…
So here goes nothing 
I’ve known most of my life that biological children were not going to be in my future. The radiation treatment I received at the age of 5 1/2 for Wilms’ tumor caused permanent damage to my ovaries and uterus. I started on hormone replacement therapy at the age of 12. Yup, I went right to menopause. Initially, I was not bothered by the infertility aspect of my life. I felt weird having to take hormones to make myself “normal”, but it was a part of my life.
Then I grew up and began dating my future husband, T (well, I thought I was grown up, I was 17). After dating for just over a year, we got engaged. Suddenly, the infertility meant so much more. Here was this guy I had fallen in love with and I realized down the road I wanted children. The loss of being able to have children with him, a combination of us, began to hurt.
Two years later, we were married. Two years after that, we began talking about becoming parents. T already knew about the cancer, the treatment, the resulting infertility because I was open with him from the beginning of our relationship. We talked about adoption and we talked about infertility treatments. My very last visit with my pediatric endocrinologist right before I turned 18, she mentioned that in vitro fertilization with donor eggs might work but it would depend on my uterus and its flexibility. We had an appointment with PH, who is both my doctor and T’s doctor. He referred us to a reproductive endocrinologist.
So that was the next step and all I feel like writing tonight…
The Way to Widget (part 2)
February 13th, 2006
Let’s see I left off with the referral to the reproductive endocrinologist…
T and I went to our appointment at the end of 1999 (either November or December) to meet with Dr. Young. He was nice, very positive about our option of IVF with donor eggs. The only thing I was never sure about was whether he ever really understood my childhood treatments. I know I filled the information out in their pre-paperwork, and I assumed that PH relayed the reason for the referral, but what I learned a few years later leads me to question it now.
A step backwards just a second, when T and I began discussing doing the IVF procedure, my older sister, surprisingly volunteered to donate eggs. We did a lot of talking about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. My sister had her first child the year before and, I think, wanted us to have our first child soon too. Eventually, we decided that this would be the closest we could get to having a child with our genes and felt confident that our relationship would be able to withstand the dynamics of having my/our child biologically related to my sister. Part of the process was that all of us had to have interviews with a psychologist/social worker, separately and together, after which the social worker said she never had a group of people she felt sure would be able to handle the complexities of the situation.
So, my sister, T and I began the testing phase in January 2000. The egg retrieval and first transfer were at the beginning of March 2000. After the required two weeks of waiting, I had the blood test. Negative. It was extremely hard to hear and to have a period after it. Even though I never established a pregnancy, there had been living embryos in my uterus- it felt like a miscarriage.
About a week after the negative test, my paternal grandfather died from liver cancer. He had so much life up to his 6 months of illness prior to his death. He was a huge part of my growing up years and his passing was extremely upsetting. The only time in my life that I got absolutely passed out drunk complete with vomiting was about a week later.
May 2000 was our second try using some of the embryos we had frozen after retrieval. Again it failed. Again, I felt intense sadness when I had my “cycle” afterwards.
We gave ourselves six months to get away from the ups and downs of emotions from the two failed transfers. We did not want to leave any frozen embryos in limbo/storage and there were enough to do a transfer so we had our last attempt at the end of November 2000. I remember thinking that if the first transfer had worked, I would have been close to giving birth, but instead I was still trying to get pregnant. But it was not to be.
We both cried and then closed the door to pregnancy. In a way, I almost think it was harder for T to deal with than it was for me. I had been through the grief of infertility already and this was just a confirmation of what I knew. For T, he had to come to the acceptance that his children would not be biologically his either. Granted, he knew marrying me that adoption was likely the method we were going to build our family but once we started talking about the possibility of me getting pregnant through the IVF, I think he latched on to that idea quickly and was excited about being a dad to his biological children.
In the eighteen months from closing the pregnancy door to starting the adoption process, I said to him several times that he didn’t have to stay with me because of my inability to even be pregnant. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to me…
Way to Widget part III
March 3rd, 2006
So I realized I never got to the adoption part of our family journey.
It took us about 18 months to come to the agreement that we were both ready to begin the adoption process. We had decided that we wanted to do a domestic adoption first, because we hoped to be able to have the parenting experience from newborn on. After some searching and some recommendations, we ended up choosing an agency and getting started on our homestudy. For us, the paperwork process took about six months. It takes less for some people, but we had to wait for classes to be offered and T took longer to complete his self-study (with a few arguments on my part about whether this meant he didn’t want to adopt or what). So we were finally approved and ready to go almost exactly two years after our final failed IVF cycle, November 2002.
And we waited
and waited
and waited
and waited
for 11 months, when we finally got a phone call from our SW saying an expectant mom had chosen our profile and wanted to meet us. Found out baby was a girl due beginning of November.
We met. It felt like it clicked. We met again, this time with her mom present. Things went well. We all hugged at the end of the second meeting and her mom asked if she could give the baby the things she had bought, which we said sure, we would love it and hoped we would be able to have some occasional visits with them and the expectant mom’s other children. We would see each other at the hospital.
Phone call came about 4 in the afternoon on November 4, 2003 that she was at the hospital. We waited and finally got a call in the morning November 5 around 9 that she was born in the early morning. I remember asking T as we were waiting for a call during the night, if he thought she would change her mind. He didn’t know but she seemed sure she was going to place that night at dinner.
After the morning call, we waited for an “it is okay to come to the hospital” call. We went to lunch with my mom, sisters, and MIL. By mid afternoon, we got a call hinting that things were not looking in the direction of placement. We went home and just waited. No calls, nothing. The next day we got a call saying that she was going to place the baby in interim care while she decided, but she didn’t want us any more involved than we already were, because she knew this was very emotional for us as well. Friday morning, I braved going to work, and I got the call there saying she decided to parent. Our SW was great asking if I wanted her to come and meet me somewhere- she ended up meeting me at work and we talked for awhile. Then, I left to go tell T at his work. Our pastor at the time came over and prayed with me, but I was so angry with God for putting us that close and dashing it away, I had a hard time listening.
We decided to keep ourselves in the waiting pool of profiles and began to wait again.
It ended up being what felt like the longest and worst year of my life….
The Way to Widget Final 
March 7th, 2006
2004 did not start well…
Shortly after our match failed, we found out a couple we are friends with (I’ve known her since preschool and then, we reconnected in college) had a miscarriage. Very sad since she was almost to the end of her first trimester.
T started a new job, so we had the “stress” of that to deal with.
The first week of January, we found out the couple we are closest to, she was pregnant (due September).
The third week of January, we found out T’s brother and his girlfriend, she was pregnant (due August).
The beginning of March, we found out my older sister was pregnant with her third (due November).
Mother’s day we found out my younger sister was pregnant with her first (due January).
End of May, early June we found out the couple who had the miscarriage, she was pregnant again (due in December).
All that time, nothing, no profile showings, no phone calls, not even that many expectant women interested in adoption were coming into our agency office.
I tried desparately to be happy for everyone and really, I was but it was so incredibly hard for me to hear over and over again pregnancy talk.
The depression I had been struggling with kept weighing me down and I was angry with God and I pushed myself further and further away from my church upbringing.
For the most part, I quit going to church, only going on when I felt guilty that I hadn’t been there in months.
We moved that summer about 30 minutes from my family and closer to our friends (not sure if that was the smartest idea but it was closer to T’s new job).
By August, underneath I had completely fallen apart. I kept up my “surface” self and smiled, bought baby presents, went to baby showers and wondered why no expectant mom/couple was choosing us- we were on the web, we were willing to match out of state, we were willing to be far more open than we had originally said, but still nothing.
When our friends’ baby was born in September (Rosie who I watch now), I remember getting off the phone with her dad, calling our CW and just bursting into tears. She did help but still said that there was not much happening in terms of placements. Not a bad thing, since women were finding themselves capable of parenting, but still hard for me (well, really us).
T and I started to talk. Did we want to switch agencies and try somewhere else? Would this be a good decision or should we just wait out where we were? Finally, we decided to at least research a couple of agencies we did not look at before because they were not where we had lived.
I opened the phone book to jot down the number of one agency we thought we would look at and the ad for another one jumped out at me. I thought, “Oh, it is another small agency. We won’t have much luck there.” I called the number of the first agency, and well, felt unimpressed and not interested in that one. I honestly felt something pulling me to call the other agency. Finally, after debating with myself for nearly an hour, I thought, “It can’t hurt.” So I called.
I got the adoption coordinator/CW, who said they were incredibly swamped with moms looking to place. They had three who wanted to pick adoptive parents and only had a couple profiles available to show them. I explained our situation, that we had had a failed match but had an active homestudy we could transfer. She then explained the basic circumstances surrounding the pregnancies of the three moms and wanted to know what we thought about open adoption because she was a big advocate for it- the more open, the better.
I said I would talk to my husband and call her back but we were interested in an open adoption if that was what the mom/couple wanted.
So T and I had a long talk…
It wouldn’t cost us much more to transfer than we already would have to pay the current agency if they matched us and we had a placement that finalized. Of the situations the new agency had, only one was what we considered the “ideal” situation, another was close and one was not an option for us. We hemmed and hawed, played phone tag with the adoption coordinator. Finally, we decided that even if we didn’t match with either of the two that we would be open to having our information shown to, we would only be making a lateral move and they had fewer families to “compete” with if other moms looking to place came in. We arranged a meeting for October 28, which also turned out to be the day my older sister had her third child.
The night before the meeting, I got a call from the adoption coordinator wanting to know if we would like to fill out their profile form prior to coming in and possibly bring some pictures so they could show our information as soon as we were ready. We said ok and hurriedly filled the forms out and threw some photos in a photo album. Our profile was still at our old agency but we did get a copy of our homestudy to take with us.
We get to the meeting and it goes really well. While we were there, the pregnancy counselor comes in to meet us and to talk to the adoption coordinator. Turns out one of the expectant moms was coming in that afternoon to look at the profiles they did have, the pregnancy counselor wanted to be able to show ours too. The problem was in order to be able to show us, the adoption coordinator had to physically come to our house. We set up for her to come at about 3:30 that afternoon, since I was off work that day anyway. She comes and walks through the house- we are good to go.
At 6:30, I got a phone call…
The expectant mom, L, (who was actually the “ideal” situation) chose us and wanted to meet us. I just about fell over in shock because I never considered that it might actually happen that way. We arranged to have dinner at her parents’ house the following week. We found out the mom was due on my Grandpa’s birthday, November 21 (and I’m born on my mother’s grandpa’s birthday) and the baby was a girl.
We met her and her stepsister for dinner, and we also met her dad and stepmom that following week. Then another week later, we had them to our house to see where we lived and what kind of environment she would be raised in. We talked about names and told them the first name we liked and asked if she would like to pick the middle name. She chose her own middle name, which I thought was sweet and wanted to use the first name we picked on the birth certificate, even though we told her she could name her whatever she wanted.
Then on Sunday morning, November 21 (right on time), at about 6 am we got a phone call that L was in labor and at the hospital. Once the baby was born, we would be called. We actually went to church that Sunday because it was a “special” service my dad and brother were a part of. T and I drove back home waiting for that phone call. Finally, about 3:30 pm, we got the call that Widget had been born an hour before and we could come to the hospital and see her.
We got there and saw L first. She was so sweet and looked pretty good for having just been through a long night and day of labor. I hugged her, we chattd for a few minutes and then her dad came in, so we let them talk (he had been on his way to Oklahoma and turned around when he heard she was in labor) and went to see Widget. She was an hour and a half old. We watched her first bath and another check over. Then we held her and sat in awe of this little baby we might be going to raise (well, since I’m calling her Widget we do get the thrill of raising her!).
And that is how she came to be in our family, along with her birthmom and her family.
