Our Journey Toward Adoption

After writing my blog for a few months, today I want to share a bit more of the background story that brought us here. Earlier this year, I wrote a newsletter piece for the Bay State Chapter of Resolve (National Infertility Organization). It was called “Our Journey Toward Adoption,” and I’ve excerpted it below to better explain our back story.

I feel very blessed to have married my best friend. I knew when I met my husband that my mom had taken DES, a drug given to women in the ‘60s to prevent miscarriage. Back then, I didn’t know it could impact fertility. But I did know that we both wanted to be married for a while before we tried to start a family.

We started to experience layoffs during the ‘dot-bomb’ era that resulted in the quick demise of our companies. We decided to keep waiting and to buy our first home—a house that ended up having toxic mold that, due to concerns over my husband’s severe asthma and allergies, forced us to move out. So we did move, first into a hotel and then into an apartment where we’ve been ever since. That was eight years ago, when we’d already been married for seven years. Time ticked on my biological clock. But we recognized that it was not a good time to start a family because we were renting an apartment, and paying a mortgage and legal fees. In other words—we were in DEBT!

When we got closer to settling our case with the house builder, we started to try to conceive. Happily, it didn’t take long and we were pregnant within three months. That was the year Chanukah and Christmas fell on the same day. Normally we celebrate both, but that was also the day the bleeding started. I miscarried around my sixth week of pregnancy and it took six more weeks until my pregnancy test was negative again. The doctors performed a test called a hysterosalpingogram, an ultrasound wherein dye is injected through the uterus and fallopian tubes, and discovered my T-shaped uterus, a classic DES Daughter side effect.

Lot of tests and pokes and prods later, my doctors said different things—one fertility specialist prescribed Clomid; another had me doing inseminations. As it turns out, I was able to become pregnant. Unfortunately, I was not able to keep those pregnancies past the sixth or seventh week. We even tried in vitro fertilization and that was unsuccessful; so we began to plan to adopt a baby.

Interestingly, my husband always wanted to adopt, even before I did. I loved the idea of being pregnant, and that emotion kept me hopeful that my body would cooperate. Seeing friends and family members pregnant elicited a deep sadness, Mother’s Day became the most painful day of the year and, eventually, all we wanted was to be parents.

While we began to research adoption, as often happens to couples who struggle with fertility issues, we became pregnant. Unlike the earlier pregnancies, this one happened with no medical intervention or assistance from the specialists, whatsoever. We became optimistic that it was “the one” and were happy when the blood test results showed the best increase of HCG so far. Then the bleeding started again, and we had ultrasounds almost every day.

I was under a great deal of stress and not optimistic at the first appointment, where we were scheduled to try to see the heart beat for the first time. They said there was a problem and rescheduled it for another day, while still testing my blood. Really, we all knew what was going on by then, but tried our best to hope for the best.

Since that pregnancy was my fourth, I knew I was going to request a D&C to help complete the process. We were going to begin meetings and home study classes to start the adoption and I didn’t want this to drag on more painfully than it already had. That was a year ago.

As many of you now know, we have since experienced two failed adoptions. I’m not sure if a failed adoption is more or less challenging than waiting and waiting for more than a year just to be selected. I suspect they both hurt in their own unique way. Perhaps that is a topic for my next blog.

Tags: failed adoption, miscarriage, u.s. newborn adoption

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