Back in the game - for three months!

I had an appointment with my physio on Tuesday. She thought that I had progressed quite well with my arm. I can bend it more - but not straighten it so well. Now that I'm back at work, the gym and driving again, my confidence has increased (around living with a bung arm) and she noticed that.

So I asked her. I asked her if she thought I could care for a baby - that our plans to adopt were on hold and that we only had a few months left in the pool of prospective adoptive parents. She said to go for it. She suggested practising carrying around bags of pototoes or flour (!). I said I had been testing the water, trying to lift our cat!

The thing is, she's young and not a Mum and I'm not sure her advice is necessarily right. I feel weak, sore and tired right now. But I am getting better each week. The reality is I will have a disabled arm for life. It will never be the same. I damaged my arm way too severely for it tofully recover. My surgeon and physio have both warned me about this.

I phoned our social worker on Tuesday and told her what the physio said. So she is happy for our file to be reopened. I've just emailed her an edited version of our profile - as a few things have changed over the last six months or so (husband has a new job, we have a dog, I hurt my arm and if we adopted now, I would leave my job for good.) I will be dropping off a colour final version to her by the end of the month.

Our file expires April 29th so we have in effect three months left in the pool of prospective adoptive parents!!

I have to say I am both excited and relieved about this. We have a teeny tiny opportunity in a very small time-frame for something to work out. And if it doesn't; it is finally over. I can honestly say I am glad the end is in sight, whatever happens.

Our social worker said it was time to consider a biannual update if we wanted to go in the pool for another two years. She said we could think about it and come in and let her know. I said we knew already - I told her we didn't want to go in the pool for another two years. In fact I wanted to say "God no!!" when she asked me. I'm so over the waiting. I said we'd consider fostering but that might not be immediately - that later on we'd make contact with the appropriate social worker.

For coming up to five and a half years I have lived a life on hold and I simply can't do it anymore. I'm done. I've started looking to the future and there is hope that a life exists for me post-SIF, that once this era is finally done and dusted I will be free and able to move on. If fostering is something that happens, it will be more likely that we invite a child or children into our home to fit into our lives - not the other way around.

I'm moving forward - somewhere. I even booked a weekend in Sydney for my daughter and I in June. We are going over for my niece's 10th birthday. I got flights for a reasonable price. If I'd waited for another three months - until we got our "answer" around adoption I would have missed out on the flights.

So 2012 is about making life fun again - about something other than what isn't in life. I'm ready for it.

Has My Dream Expired?

I always knew 2012 would be a big year on the SIF front. I knew it would be big in the sense that an answer would finally be given around adding to our family - we would either be welcoming another child into our lives, or moving on from that dream.

For a long time I thought I would have to wait it out until April this year - when our adoption file expires before working out what comes next.

But fate intervened. Breaking my elbow put a big spanner in the works. Two months on from my accident and I still don't feel as though I am in a position to mother a baby. I cannot tie my hair back,wear a regular bra (because I can't do it up) or put on a necklace. My arm extension is severely limited. My surgeries may be over - for now at least - but there is still a long way to go physio-wise. I have three slings to wear at home to help bend and extent my arm. I am in pain and discomfort about eighty percent of the time. I'm driving and am back at work again. But I have a long way to go recovery-wise.

I know within my heart that I have made the right decision putting our adoption plans on hold. But the reality is we may not even be going back into the pool of prospective adoptive parents before April if my arm/physical health isn't greatly improved over the next three months.

As angry as I was at first to have to accept that possibility; it has somehow given me the reality check I needed perhaps to move on for once and for all. Because at the moment the whole adoption deal seems to be moving against us.

So instead of waiting until April, I am making changes now in my life. Changes I need to do for me. I am looking for a new job and am hoping to find work as a teacher aide and to perhaps work voluntarily in a Kindergarten to see if that is the field I want to move into. It seems retraining in 2013 in Early Childhood Education is a big possibility.

Even though I cried when I shared with a friend that one night a voice came to me recently that said "Mummy, go and help the other children." - I believed it was a message from my daughter who passed over during early pregnancy at the age of six weeks. Don't ask me why I think the baby I miscarried was a girl - I just do. I feel her spirit with me often and I feel I am really getting that it is time to let go of my dream of a two-child family. If I hadn't broken my arm and had time to reflect about a lot of things, I'm pretty sure I would be desperately holding out for an adoption outcome in April.

A peacefulness has emerged within our family over the last few weeks. My husband has had three weeks off work, I've worked very small hours so have also been in holiday mode and of course our daughter is on Summer school holidays. We haven't gone far. Many families around us have gone camping. But because of my arm and the pain/discomfort I'm in and the physio I'm still doing and the fact my husband is very happy to stay put after working long hours for months; we stayed at home. We've had very cruisy days holidaying in the town we live in and have had to make the most of our own company since friends have been away. It's been good for us. Almost as though a type of healing has take place.

If this is the way my life is meant to be - as a family of three - then I finally give up the fight to make it different. The universe has made it clear that it's time to move on - that my dream has pretty much expired.

A Brand New Year

2012. Four days into a brand new year and I wonder what it will bring. It is the year in which we will finally gain some closure around our adoption plans as our file expires in April. Our file is currently on hold as I continue to heal from my fall two months ago. I had my second surgery on my arm just a week ago and am still in a lot of pain and discomfort - especially at night. Certainly not in a position to be nurturing a baby, as much as I hate to admit that.

I've been doing some soul-searching/reflecting these last couple of months. One thing that has come resoundingly clear over the last few days is I want to leave my job. I only applied for my job to keep me occupied while my daughter was at school so I wouldn't be at home wallowing in my SIF grief. Too much. And obviously I may as well be earning some dollars during the week too.

On some level, despite the cynical side that dominates my being after five plus years of SIF; I believe everything happens for a reason. So yes, there have been lessons from this job, and experiences gained. There have been loads of challenges and the main one being that the field I work in hasn't been funded by the government for the last two years and it has been like fighting a losing battle.

Before my fall I was stretched managing my job/home-life/my daughter with my husbands' long working days. But now that I'm physically disabled (I cannot extend my right arm and this limits a lot of what I can do), I know that I will be stretched more than ever.

So I am contemplating resigning soon and looking for other work. Not immediately; within the next few months.

I have also been thinking that it is important for me to come up with an alternative if the adoption plans fall through. The reality is, the chances are high that adoption won't work out - and we may not even make it make into the pool of perspective adoptive parents if my arm isn't "baby ready."

Fostering was my original plan C if we couldn't have or adopt another child. But at this point in time my husband isn't so keen...

So come April I need to know that there is something else for me to look forward to in life if (and I want to say when) our adoption plans fail.

I have been thinking about retraining as a Kindergarten teacher - or the correct term - an early childhood education teacher. My degree is in education/psychology so I only would have to do one year to be qualified. It's too late to apply for this year plus I'm not physically well enough to do some serious study. So I'm looking at 2013.

I thought after leaving my job at some point this year that I could have a go at teacher-aide work and perhaps do some volunteer work at the local Kindy to see if is for me.

This might all sound very exciting - and God knows I like to study and retrain. But it breaks my heart that I am now at the point of seriously having to consider another plan to motherhood for the second time round.

Yes I know I would get to "mother" the three and four year olds under my care if I was a Kindy teacher, but I know I would get triggered at times - especially with families of growing families that would be part of my daily life.

I no longer feel as though my life can be great or exist beyond my wildest dreams. My dreams have been shattered anyway - and have been so out of reach for so long, that I no longer know what they are. I once fantasied about being a writer and although that is my passion, the reality is I want to write for me - I enjoy creative writing or writing my story. It is something I can develop in my own time but am unlikely to make a living out of. I'm not really interested in other types of writing. I don't think...

I feel so old and downtrodden. Perhaps I have hoped for too much. I have given up creating the kind of life that I wanted and am instead being guided by God - and am just not at this stage so enthused about the direction He seems to want me to go in. I seem to have lost all positivity and it's not how I want to be. I just have to pray and hope that God will lead me to a new beginning, if that is the way it's meant to go, one day at a time.