hodgepodge, mishmash, and SPAM

Two posts in one week. I almost feel like an overachiever. Almost. Let's face it, I still have those wonky ovaries to contend with...and would someone please clean my oven already?

No, seriously, it's a mess and and that whole "self-cleaning" thing is a scam.

So this is going to be a mixed bag of tricks...pretty much just because I like to mix things up I'm a little bit mixed up I have been working overtime on contraptions for another planet and my brain is just plum tuckered out - yes, it really is bad enough to use plum tuckered. I have been slacking in the sharing department lately and even though it might be easier to just change the "share a little more than I should" part from my profile description, I began over sharing for a reason. I sure wish I could remember what it was now. I also wish I had remembered to charge my cell phone before work today too, but I can't seem to do it all. I'm only one woman, ya know.

Since most of my gazillion draft posts have to do with some aspect of adoption I should probably give an overview of "what's up with all that anyway" on our end. It seems to have become a bit of a big pink elephant on my blog. At best, I tiptoe around it sometimes making mention and other times completely avoiding it altogether. You all are so sweet and patient to not tell me to just get the shit out of my mouth already and say what I really mean. It's one of the many reasons I love you. Yes, you.

Let the hodgepodging begin...

I want to adopt. I want to adopt in a way that is NOT just because it seems like the next logical step because we can't have biological children. I want to provide a family for a child* and I think we could be a pretty damn good one. I want to be a part of a child's life to teach them and help them find their way in this world.

One of my bigger hurdles on fully coming to this mindset had to do with me getting over the fact that our family will be different. So I am still somewhat reading this same book from months gone by.



Some pictures or equations or end of the chapter math problems would sure make it go a lot faster I suspect.

One of the chapters talks about 3 steps to building entitlement. It says:

Families built by adoption need to engage in the life-long process of building a sense of vested rightfulness between parents and children - each coming to believe they deserve and belong to one another.

I don't like this phrase much and prefer the reference toward entitlement as well as the words rightfulness, deserve, and belong to be axed completely, but that is just me. I can look past it for now and move on to the steps so I actually get somewhere today.

One of the steps is recognizing and accepting that adoption is different from building a family by birth.

For the recognizing part I give myself an A, but the accepting part required a little extra thinking and a few tutoring sessions.

Being the different family to me as a child meant I had 2 parents who didn't work outside the home and one of them was severely disabled. Our family looked different. We stood out in a crowd. We did not do things like everyone else and to date I have only met one other person who was raised in a similar manner...except his mom did still work outside the home and his family talked about his dad's illness and what it meant and all that other apparent healthy stuff that we glossed over pretending it didn't exist.

Answering what my parents did for a living was a constant source of confusion mixed with embarrassment as people never knew how to really respond to my answer. It was either met with a quick subject change or otherwise followed up with "So what does your family do for money then?" Right, because every 8-year-old should know the inner workings of the family finances and clearly that is everyone's business anyway. Those 2 questions were my childhood form of the ever popular "Do you have kids?" and "Why don't you just adopt then?". While I would never change anything about my family and I am able to see so many positive aspects to my situation, "different" still came with a big hairy wart of a stigma that forced me to really take a better look at things. I had to completely let go of that childhood dream that one day FINALLY I would have a family "just like everyone else's" and really feel like I fit without adding a bunch of asterisks for the differences. Yes, this stuff is deep rooted even if it isn't fully logical.

It took a lot of thinking and a little talking (I am MUCH less wordy in therapy - almost shockingly so) to change my frame of mind into embracing the differences. Our child won't come with expectations of possessing certain characteristics or traits because they came from our genes, but as truly their own little individuals in our family that we will be proud of. I won't assume that our child will have the same fields of interest simply because they are part of a family where "most everyone is able to do/has fill-in-your-family's-thing/trait/feature-here". I want to help them explore every facet they may possibly want to try without any unrealistic expectations that they are in some way a little carbon copy of and constantly compared to one of us.

I'm okay with not hearing "Well, I have a biological child and I plan to help them explore everything too and yadda, yadda, yadda..." That is not my point. I am not trying to make a comparison between the 2. I am only explaining my change of thought from focusing on something I wanted and am missing out on to how I am embracing something different and in most ways finding it even better.

SPAM. Have never had it. Have never wanted to have it. Likely never will have it. It has nothing to do with this post except I thought it finished off the title nicely so I had to put it in here somewhere. This is as good of place as any. I hope it lightens the mood. SPAM. And there it is.

Now back to adoption...

I am there and I am in it. I haven't always been (obviously) and I honestly wasn't sure I ever would be. It feels good. I think had I not taken my time, I might have gone into this feeling conflicted that I was again part of a "different" family in a negative way. I may not be able to compare and contrast with other women how long my labor was or how difficult breastfeeding was for me or how much our child looks just like M, but I will have a story. It will be different. It will be mine. It will be beautiful because I will see it that way and share it that way and truly feel it.

I say all of this like we are moving down the path and finding an agency and doing all that jazz (which I might add that I have some likely unpopular opinions on, but not for the reasons you might think. Another day). This is where M and I are not on the same page. He is just not there. Just as I did, he is doing this in his own time. He is still open to the idea of adoption, but it is not a sure thing for him and it may never be and I appreciate his honesty even when it hurts like hell.

I don't know the answers to this part yet and I don't want to dig into them at this point in time. It is a bridge we will cross if we need to. I can tell you with all certainty that we will not adopt if we are not both 100% committed and I can also tell you that if we do not adopt I will likely need to be committed (at least for a short time while I attempt to scotch tape my already stomped on and battered heart back together).

It's complicated. It's scary. It's something I'm going to place on the back burner for now because how many blog posts can I write about "OMG, will he ever change his mind?". He needs space to explore and think and all I can do right now is support him and let him do what he needs and hope our pages merge again one day.

Shameless plug for what might have helped your reluctant spouse (or yourself if you were the reluctant one) over the hump so to speak. Therapy. check. Space and time. check. Open mind. check. Patience and understanding. check. Tools and resources. check. Are there any adoption after infertility dad blogs out there who wrote about their thought process on how they made the choice to adopt??

I'm jaded enough to know that childless is how we could remain. Thank you very much for your expansive teachings on this, infertility. I'm also not ready to accept this could be it for us so for now I will continue to talk about adoption even if we are not actively pursuing it. At the least I will keep working through my other baggage 'cause that crap just gets plain heavy and needs to be dumped somewhere.

So there it is. Welcome to my head. Much like my oven, it's a mess in there.


*this phrase + adoption agency processes cause me great distress...more on this soon