The Road to Thor

Part I. Dusty Eggs.

When the Reproductive Endocrinologist told us we had less than a 1% chance of conceiving our biological child we thought the world had caved in on us...for about two days...and then I just got ornery. My diagnosis was high FSH as a result of premature ovarian failure. Talk about a shit sandwich. This diagnosis doesn’t really leave one feeling like there’s a whole lot of options. I got it a few times from a couple of docs (because I was ornery) and each time they delivered it with a little cock of the head. You know, that look that attempts to indicate empathy. I think because of my advanced age (?! I was 37 at the time) we never found an RE that appeared to give a rip. Had we elected to proceed with high-tech (expensive) options that may have changed...but that’s just my bitter perspective.

After the diagnoses I consulted my good buddy Dr. Google (where you get what you pay for) and found that there was, indeed, LOADS of hope for my dusty ole eggs (heh). So began the regime...acupuncture, Chinese herbs, wheatgrass, temperature charting, loads of obscure supplements, sex on a schedule (hardly inspirational, my good friend calls it “gas station sex”...ding ding...fillerup!), cleansing fasts, special diets, and NO ALCOHOL (emmmm...excuse me?). In the meantime, I watched my friends get pregnant again, and again...sometimes accidentally.

Then we moved to Ireland. Oh. My. God. I have never, in my life, seen so many fekkin’ babies and pregnant women in one place. It really does live up to its reputation as a fecund nation. I tried to continue with the Eastern medicine regime, even going so far as to send digital pictures of my tongue to my Chinese doc back home (a means for diagnosis) and having monthly telephone conferences with her. We even upped the supplement intake to the point where we were each taking about 20-30 pills/day. Fun. We looked into going the high-tech/IVF route over here but I never really felt good about it. You know. Even though I watched my friends getting pregnant through IVF, the “gut check” just never revealed that warm-fuzzy feeling of hope. So I took some more wheatgrass.

Then winter set in. Now, Irish winters can be pretty damn dark and dismal...especially if you’ve lost all hope. There was just no light at all....and all of our friends and family were really really far away. But it was in this darkness that a little light appeared. We’ll call that little light....Thor, God of Thunder (or just Thor for short, I’ll explain the name in another post).

Part II. Sandwich Gone.

We had discussed adoption briefly when we were first handed the shit sandwich but the time just wasn’t right. I was too busy being ornery. But when I brought it up in the midst of the dark Irish winter (actually, I think we were in Scotland over Christmas) it was a pretty simple conversation.

Me: “Should we adopt?”
Floyd (that’s what we’ll call my darling husband): “Yea.”

Whew. It was just that easy. We always knew that it was the making of a family that was the most important thing for us and we were open to the different ways that can happen. Once we finally decided to adopt we felt like a huge weight had been lifted from our shoulders. The sun came out and we could, finally, FINALLY feel hope again. I think The Naked Ovary put it best when she wrote about adoption after infertility, “I never imagined that hope can have other soil.” (credit where credit’s due – that was the inspiration for my blog name. Read her post "The Mom Precipice" under Adopty when you get a chance.).

We pretty quickly decided on international adoption (for all sorts of reasons) and then chose China (for all sorts of reasons). I doggedly researched agencies. I worked off a list of agencies that work with Americans living abroad (there’s easily about 100 of them), made phone calls, reviewed their websites and mission statements (I was uncomfortable with the agencies that were heavy on religion), developed spreadsheets and did more gut checks. Once we picked our agency it started to feel pretty real.

So now the light of Thor was getting brighter...

Since I’m not working much over here I was able to kick some serious butt in getting our homestudy done and preparing our dossier (our paperwork). This whole process was made slightly more complicated and time-consuming by the distance from things like authenticated birth certificates, as well as our expat status, but, if you don’t spend too much time bitching about it, you just get it done. So we got our dossier over to China on May 22nd (DTC) and we were logged into the Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs (AKA God) on May 24th (our LID). And now we wait...and wait...and wait.

When we got started we thought the wait was going to be about 8-10 months but now they’re telling us the wait will be somewhere around 12-18 months (from LID). Jaysus. This puts our gestation period at somewhere between a sperm whale's and an Asian elephant's. Needless to say, this is a serious bummer. I’m trying not to bum out about it too much. Downside? It’s not the way we planned it (stomp my foot). We wanted to have this time in Ireland to make our family. Upside? Instead of starting a family while we’re over here we’re going to take the opportunity to travel. And travel we will. Scottish Highlands in early August, London-Paris in late August, Croatia in September, the south of France in October and Prague-Budapest in late October. But all this travel is just not distracting enough....I still think about ways to decrease the wait...but I’ll save that for another post.

So, we’ve gone from eating the big shit sandwich to feeling like we’re the luckiest folks in the world...because we have Thor to look forward to. Isn’t life funny?