A book review, of sorts

I read a book, quite a long while back, that I found incredibly interesting. It's quite out of date, and also out of print, and not all of it was relevant, but at the time when I read it, bits of it gave me that 'aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh' you only get from writing that expresses thoughts that you didn't even know you had. It's called 'adopting after infertility ' by Patricia Johnston (and I'm going to continue to use 'infertility' as an inaccurate shorthand for my own weirdo problems here) and the first chapter lists six key infertility losses. The author says they are: loss of control over many aspects of life, loss of genetic continuity, loss of creating a child with your partner, loss of the emotional gratifications of pregnancy and birth, loss of the physical gratifications of pregnancy and birth, and loss of the opportunity to parent.

She then goes on to say that adoption adresses only one of these losses - loss of the opportunity to parent - and that all the other losses still need to be faced separately, because adoption isn't going to deal with them. Reading this was a real lightbulb moment for me, and I've thought about it a lot since. I'd been really struggling with the feelings of 'but we're adopting! I should be happy! How can I still feel sad?' and it really helped me to separate out the different reasons for the sadness and the joy I was feeling, and to start putting them in the right emotional boxes. I've found it really helpful to try to separate out which of our big sack of losses are directly related to the adoption (eg missing the first few months of THIS baby's life), and which are only to do with our fertility problems and would persist whether or not we ever adopted. This helps me not to blame the adoption process for things that aren't its fault. And allocate the blame with more accuracy, because who doesn't want to be able to do that?

I'm not sure why, but some of these losses feel very intense to me right now, and these days I feel like I'm walking around under my own black raincloud. I find the first loss, the loss of control, particularly difficult - but I guess you all already knew that. Somewhere tangled up in that, I think, is the lost opportunity to be NORMAL. The assumption that your life will be unremarkable in a good way, and that you will be able to enjoy what those around you are enjoying. That whole 'oh, we're planning to have a summer baby' thing, I guess. Of course, when I say 'normal', I actually mean 'blessed beyone measure', but I hope you know what I mean. Although actually, I hope you are lucky enough NOT to know what I mean - like you feel that you're living your life behind a thick pane of glass that separates you and all your experiences from those of the people around you. I don't necessarily mean in a depressed way, just in a 'our lives really aren't the same, are they? I think we're operating under a completely different set of assumptions' way. I guess that as life progresses, more and more people end up behind their own pane of glass, whether through serious illness, bereavement, divorce or any one of the other things that could make a person feel not only grief but intense isolation. I think a lot of us just got ours earlier than we would have liked.

I can't imagine the shock it must be if you've always assumed that you're fertile and then find out there is something wrong. But I still sort of envy that experience because I have always, always known that I was broken and I did not even get TEN SECONDS to happily grasp my husband's hand, look into the future and assume everything would be okay. And at the moment, for some reason, I'm really sad about the fact that I never even had this false normality. In my alternative life, where I don't have anything wrong with me, or at least I don't know about it, I get to spend the first few years of being married saying 'wow, I feel like I should really have kids at some point, but right now I'm just enjoying how my career is taking off, and I'm SO BUSY, you know?' rather than feeling defective and anxious.

And I think this opportunity to feel normal is now completely lost to me - gone forever. Even if we ditched this now (which we definitely aren't going to) and I got healthily pregnant tomorrow (which I don't actually want to) that opportunity would still be gone because so much of the not-normal has already happened. I am not normal. My life will not ever be normal. It will never have been normal. There may come a time when I don't care about this very much, but whatever I do I can't change it. Right now, all this unwanted differentness makes my heart feel really heavy. I don't think it's better to be normal, but dangit, it sure looks easier, and I feel weary of this.

Not helping is the fact that 'our' orphanage in Addis is having constant internet problems, and the director is unable to read or reply to email. And since we can't use an agency, we don't have a country rep to contact or send a message to. So we're still waiting for an answer to our query about twins, and that was sent a month ago, and I worry that it's a problem with power, too, and that there will be things they need to do for the babies that they can't do, and what if our baby/ies is/are there NOW? He/She/They might be! And when am I going to know how many there will be, so I can construct my sentences properly?

When is all this going to end?