This post reminded me of sitting in our education seminar 1,000 years ago when we first began the adoption process. At the start of the information-overloaded weekend, each couple was asked to tell the group a little about themselves, including why they had chosen to pursue (or at least learn more about) adoption. 

As we went around the room, couple after couple described their struggles with infertility, most of them banging their heads against the IUI and/or IVF walls for many years. The couple that sticks out in my mind the most tried for more than a dozen years before finally throwing their hands up and looking into adoption. (Twelve years! Twelve years of scheduled sex, temperatures, hormone shots, inseminations, sperm “deposits”, egg retrievals, embryo transfers… It exhausts me just thinking about the financial and emotional turmoil.) 

We never bothered with any of that. We knew, going in, that biological children would not happen for us without medical intervention, so we never tried. We knew that we wanted to have our family young, and that we didn’t want to spend time and money on what could very well be a fruitless effort, so we made a conscious decision to adopt straight away.

But that seems not to be the norm. I find that people often view adoption as a second choice, a back-up plan, a last resort. It never felt that way for us, and I’ve struggled to articulate that properly (or succinctly – I always felt like I had to explain our entire decision-making process whenever someone asked why we didn’t “try” to have “our own” kids first).

Then yesterday, Viaukraine said it perfectly (and in just fifteen words!): 

I never felt sad about adopting. To me adoption isn’t something I am settling for.

That’s not to say that I was never sad about the fact that I wasn’t going to be pregnant - I was, no doubt about it. (Truth be told, I still am, some days.) But what I grieved was pregnancy, not biological children.

To each their own, of course. I don’t fault other couples for wanting to try medical intervention to have their families. Maybe we were just further along in the grieving process, having known all along that it would be difficult to produce biological offspring, but when it comes right down to it, adoption was never a consolation prize for us.

It seems silly, given how simply she put it, but thank you, Viaukraine, for finally giving me the right words!