When it became clear around two years ago that my likelihood of conceiving another biological child was slim - I started to give up hope. Not only that, I also stopped dreaming. I felt it was too cruel to myself and my family to dream of another child. Yet I continued to carry around the desire for another child while denying myself the space to dream: it was a hard place to be. I just didn't want to live with false-hope.
Since getting the closure from the infertility specialist I saw, I have somehow opened up to dreaming about another child being added to our family again. Sure, I had hoped for a long time that I would have another biological child, but for whatever reason, that wasn't meant to be. But adoption could be a possibility for us so I am going to let myself have hope and dream of another child. I will only stop dreaming and hoping when our time runs out on the adoption front.
In New Zealand you can stay in the prospective adoptive parents pool for two years. After that you have to renew your interest. My husband and I agreed way back when we started the adoption process that we wouldn't renew our interest after two years as we feel like two years is long enough for us to wait as it doesn't feel like too long to wait - there is an end in sight - and by then our daughter will be seven years old and we would pretty much be established as a family of three.
My TTC plans for a second child fell to the wayside. But our plans around adopting a child have gone relatively smoothly. I had a wee "to do list" before commencing the adoption process again after putting it on hold - and two big things off that list have already occurred - they were me getting a second job and us buying our first home. Although it took me six months to find a part-time job that fitted in with family life; I did find one. And it's a great job with a good pay rate. And the house - that totally worked out in God's time.
It is only a week til we move into our home and it feels like it is meant to be - the timing, the house - it feels so very right. I guess this has helped me gain some perspective around my SIF experience - I will probably never understand the whys of it all. But, it was a personal tragedy that I went through in life and well, it was simply something that I was completely powerless over. It was horrible and all that and I will always carry a bit of that SIF pain in my heart; but it's over now. I don't have to try and figure it out anymore. I have finally moved into acceptance.
I am a great believer in events in life leading to things. If it wasn't for SIF; we wouldn't be going down the adoption route. This means of adding to our family just feels so much more full of promise than what TTC ever did.
I went to an autism course today which was held in the same building that one of the information meetings for adoption was last year. It brought back a lot of memories and reminded of how intense it was attending such a meeting. I am glad that we took a break from the adoption process as there were several things we needed to work out and I did need some time to process things. It was the right thing to do for us.
My daughter asked the other day if she could give away a gorgeous red dress she has outgrown to a friend's second child the other day. I hesitated and as if she read my mind she said "Should we keep it for when the baby arrives?" and I said yes. Our daughter is almost five so I am not going to get into adoption with her until we are perhaps in the prospective adoptive parents pool. She doesn't need to know how a baby might be added to our family at this point in time. But I am not going to take away her hope - and I am going to enjoy having mine back - that we may have another addition in the future! Afterall, when we were looking at houses we talked about how we hoped to buy our own home one day with our daughter. Once we are further down the line, I think it's fine and healthy to include our daughter in our adoption plans.
For a while I almost tried to discourage the sibling conversations from my daughter as I really feared it wasn't going to happen for us. But we have two and a half years to dream of another child coming to our family - the rest of this year to complete the adoption process and then two years to wait and see what might happen while we sit in the prospective adoptive parents pool. I really believe if we aren't picked after this time-frame that it wasn't meant to be for us.
I chaired the fifth infertility support group meeting that I started up on Wednesday night. There were five of us and it went well. It is great to know some women in real life dealing with IF in the same town. I still have that SIF-thing of feeling a bit guilty of my pain/sharing in a room full of infertile women who don't have any children. And I have now signed up our meeting with a national organisation which means my contact details will be on the internet and I'm not sure it's appropriate to have my almost-five year old's voice on the phone message when women dealing with infertility phone up.
I guess the SIF-IF dynamic is just part of the whole SIF deal - always feeling somewhere between the fertile and infertile worlds, never quite fitting in. The other day at the gym one MOT (mother of two) and one MOTH (mother of three) from my daughter's playgroup days asked about my daughter. One knows about my SIF: the other doesn't. And I'm pretty sure the one who doesn't know about my SIF perceives me as being a woman who only wanted one child. It was on the tip of my tongue to say "I did want more than one, you know!" But I left it. I'm sick of all the conversations I've had in my head around SIF over the last three and a half years. It's time to let it go. I'm on my way to greener pastures!
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