Last weekend my husband filled out his part of the adoption papers we needed to fill in so I posted off the papers on Monday. It has been an eight month recess for us within the adoption process - all by choice. We had a list of things we wanted to achieve before resuming the adoption process and we have done them all. The main goals were for me to find another job, to buy our first home and for me to do some healing around SIF. We have achieved all those things within eight months which I'm pretty pleased about.
The next step is we will get a call - hopefully sometime soon - about who our assigned social worker will be and then we will have two - four meetings based around the application and financial assessment forms we sent in. These are different to the initial adoption forms that we filled out last year. After the social worker visits we will be advised whether or not we have been accepted in the prospective adoptive parents pool.
I am looking forward to getting things in motion again within the adoption process. It did feel good to send off the paperwork. However it is a bit of a bittersweet time in that I am having to let go of/accept the death of a dream (once again) by continuing with an alternate option to add to our family. It is a mixed bag of feelings that I have.
I had an interview with the local community paper on Tuesday about the infertility support group and a little about my story. It will be published next week with a photograph of me. Next Tuesday morning I will also be doing a small radio interview - again about the infertility support group/my story.
It does feel good to educate and to be open about my journey on one hand. On the other hand, I feel like I have really "outted" myself and am not quite sure how I will feel when I will get comments from those who were clueless about my SIF.
But I do feel over the few days that I have put a bit more distance between myself and SIF. SIF really is in the past and therefore it only makes sense that the reason I have felt out of place within my online support group of two and a half years of late - Dailystrength - is because I no longer fit there. The group is really for women who are trying to conceive within SIF - not so much for those who can't. That's the way I see it, anyway. The few of us who cannot conceive again are in the minority and at this point in time I feel as though I am visiting a room of pregnant women every time I log in! It's not a good thing for someone who is trying her darnest to move on from SIF.
So after much thought, I have decided to check in less into Dailystrength for now. I'm not quite ready to cut all ties - it might be a bit of a weaning process. I am still in the process of healing from SIF - and very much want to move to a more content place. I cannot do that when I log in daily only to see pregnancy updates within the status of friends. A close online friend suggested I hide a couple of friends who went through SIF and now have babies on Facebook. It just hurts too much to see them clucking away about their new babies on line when I am still trying to make sense of the 3.5 years I spent trying to add to our family - only to fail. I am having to apply self-preservation once again.
It might seem that I am a bit of a bitter cow at this point. Maybe I am. But through this phase of healing I am allowing myself to go through; I am finding moments of peace. I am realistic though and have no idea what God's plans are for me from here. It isn't grade school - just because some of us get the second children we want; it doesn't mean we all will. So I need to start rebuilding my life post-SIF. Eventually some plans of life as a family of three will emerge. I just still need a bit more time to "be" as I make sense of this aftermath of SIF I am in right now.
I really do see SIF as in the past now. I have stepped out of what felt like a very long period of time in my life of desperately pining another child into a time of uncertainty. Logging into Dailystrength for two and a half years is a hard habit to break - but I will never move forward if I keep talking and focusing about the things that keep me stuck. So I guess I am shedding my SIF skin. Sure, a part of me will always be about SIF but I need to find me again and to find contentment with my life as it is today. I am sick of wishing things were different.
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