So, what do you do with that whole 'infertility' thing?

After firing my OBGYN and her horrid nurse practitioner, I found myself on the phone with one of my best friends who is a nurse.  I was sitting in my church parking lot getting ready to go in to spend an evening with some really wonderful, spiritual people.  Just the thing I needed after hearing those unfeeling words from the NP.  My best friend said, "She doesn't know what she's talking about.  No one knows what this is all about.  Miracles happen every day.  Don't lose hope.  She's a bi&ch."  It was exactly what I needed to hear.

For the next few months, I stumbled around wondering if I was ever going to be a mother.  I had dreamed of being a mom; I had loved kids as long as I could remember.  I had started babysitting at the age of 11 and continued all the way through to the age of 24 after almost 2 years in Paris as a nanny.  Sure, babysitting and nannying isn't parenting, but I KNEW that I really liked kids and that I couldn't imagine a life without them.  I had gone through phases in my early 20s when I thought I wouldn't have kids, but that changed once my friends started getting married and having kids and, of course, when I met Shannon.

What would I be if I wasn't going to be a mom?  How could God, in whom I believe, do this to me? I, of all people, KNEW what parenting entailed.  My oldest brother had his first child when I was 20.  I was there when my nephew was born, and I was around a lot.  I saw first hand through my brother and his then-wife that parenting was a SH&T TON of work, and I wanted nothing more than to be a mom.

So, how do you redesign a life with that fact in mind? How do you put your best foot forward when you know that you may not ever get to fulfill your dream of being a mom?  How do you redo the dream?  I didn't think I could bear a life without kids.  I just couldn't.

After about 6 months of stumbling around, Shannon and I decided to start the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process.  Several months of testing told us that IVF was our only chance at having biological children.

In September 2006, that part of the process began.

Before Adoption: Engagement and the first year of marriage

When Shannon and I got engaged, we talked about when exactly we would have kids.  I wanted to wait a year after getting married.  He agreed, but because we weren't exactly very young when we got married, he wanted to leave a little room for changing our minds.

The year we were engaged flew by.  There was a lot going on in our lives and in that of my extended family.  Before I knew it, it was October 30, 2004, and we were walking down the aisle.

We enjoyed our first few months of being married.  We owned and lived in a condo near downtown Milwaukee, we went out a lot, we enjoyed restful weekends (I vaguely remember those), and I was furiously pounding out my dissertation.  Though we didn't have kids, I felt like I did: that dissertation took up all of my time when I wasn't teaching.  I loved what I was doing, so I didn't really feel like anything needed to change.

Then one day I started watching the Discovery Health channel during my lunch break. Though I worked mostly from home, I did set up regular work hours for myself.  On days I wasn't teaching, I was writing by 9AM with a break at about 10:30, another for lunch at noon until 1, and then more writing from 1 until about 5pm.  Having that structure and routine worked well.

So, during my downtime at lunch I would watch "Birth Stories" (or whatever it's called) and "Adoption Stories" on Discovery Health.  "Birth Stories" fascinated me.  It followed a woman and her partner through delivery.  The show talked with family, presented any physical and emotional challenges the woman was having, and then followed up with her after the baby was born. I learned a lot about different pregnancy ailments (placenta previa, gestational diabetes, for example), and I was totally fascinated with the process.

During those shows, I also realized that I didn't really care about becoming or being pregnant.  I just really wanted a newborn.  How we got one didn't matter (other than it had to happen legally. HA HA).

In June 2005, my mom and I went to London for about 10 days together. Shannon and I had been married almost a year, and I knew that we would be starting a family soon.  When I returned from London, Shannon and I talked about starting right then even though it hadn't been a year.  His theory, and rightly so, was that we weren't getting any younger, and that we were in a good spot, had gotten in to a good routine, so why not?

I agreed, and so started the process of a biological family.

By March of 2006, so about 9 months in to trying naturally, nothing had happened.  I had read online that for people our age (I was 31 and Shannon was almost 36), couples should give themselves 6-12 months to conceive.  Since it had been 9 months, I decided it was time to call our doctors.

Between March 2006 and April 2006, Shannon and I had several tests done.  **When all was said and done, my OBGYN's nurse practitioner told me, in a not-so-gentle way, "Based on what we see, your chances of conceiving a biological child on your own are slim to none. Your options now are either IVF or adoption."

Needless to say, I fired that OBGYN, wrote her a letter explaining why, and suggested that her NP take some communication classes.

And this is where our journey to adoption began.

**For personal reasons, I am leaving out a lot of the fertility details. If you would like to know more, you may contact me one-on-one via my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/KathleenWhitworthWellness.
Thanks!

Disclaimers

In my video from Monday night (http://youtu.be/xBXRfStXc0k), I made a few disclaimer.  I did a few other disclaimers in last night's video, too (You can find that video on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/KathleenWhitworthWellness).  However, I want to put some in writing too.

1. Sharing our story is a really scary thing for me to do.  To put our really personal stuff out there for the world to see kind of freaks me out, but I believe that it will help a lot of people. Therefore, I am sharing it.  
2. I love to write personal narratives.  I always have.  The thing with that, though, is that it requires a lot of memory recall.  Given that I have two kids who keep me very busy and very tired, I can't guarantee that I can recall every detail.  If someone out there asks me a specific question, I will likely be able to dig deep to find the memory.  I don't want to pull a James Frey (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/06/frey200806) and pretend like I can remember everything.  (And, let me just say, I LOVED his book.  He should have probably just included a disclaimer at the beginning of his book, and all would have been right with the world).  I will always do my best to portray our story as accurately as possible.
3. Adoption is an intensely personal journey.  The decision we made along the way are ours alone. No one told us what to do or how to approach it. Our agency gave us suggestions, but, ultimately, everything was up to us. 
4. No one ever knows what he would do in any given situation until he is confronted with it, and adoption is no different. As I said in my video last night, the decision to adopt and the decisions that lie within the adoption process are as individual as the individuals who make up the process: the adoptive parents and their extended families, the birth families and their extended families, the kiddos themselves, the social workers and the adoption agencies.  I will never EVER tell any person who is considering adoption what she should do. Ever.  Shannon and I have our experiences, and I will share those, but I will NEVER tell anyone what to do.
5. My goal is to be a resource for those who are considering adoption or who know people who are.  It can be a very confusing, overwhelming process at first, mostly because, for many people, they're first told "You can't have biological children," and then they have to make a decision: Fertility treatments? Adoption? Both? Nothing?  It's a crazy, whirlwind of emotion. Those feelings are not quickly forgotten.

I look forward to sharing more and to helping as many people as possible.  Feel free to share my Facebook page (link above) and this blog link, too.

Thanks, Friends.
Kathleen

Before Adoption: When we were dating

(John Hawk's Pub, Milwaukee, WI, November 2000)

Shannon and I met initially in August 1998 at the wedding of our dear friends.  I had just moved back from Paris and was planning on moving back after finishing my M.A. at UW-Milwaukee.  I ended up loving teaching at the university level so much that I decided to stay in the States and go on for a Ph.D.

We continued to see each other once in a while through our friends over the next two years.  In April 2000, Shannon finally asked me out (I'm leaving out A LOT of details).  We had such a great time together, all the time.  I knew almost instantly that I wanted to marry him: He is a really great person; He was close to his mom, and he talked about her so kindly and positively all the time;  He has a great circle of friends who are all really nice (just like he is) and social and love to go out and have fun; He is also really supportive of every one of my endeavors.  When we started dating in April 2000, he knew that I was headed to Penn State for my Ph.D. in August of that year, and he couldn't have been happier for me.  For the 6 years I worked on my Ph.D., Shannon was one of my biggest cheerleaders.

Shortly after Shannon and I started dating we discussed having children.  During that discussion, we happened to share with each other that we wanted to adopt 1 or 2 kids.  Before ever having met him, I knew that I wanted to adopt, and I was 99% certain that I wanted to adopt domestically (more on that later).  Shannon felt the exact same way.  I knew that, were we to get married, we had the same goals when it came to starting a family: we would have 1 biological child and then adopt 1 or 2 more children.  I remember feeling really great that I had met someone who felt as strongly about adoption as I did.  I considered it a true blessing.

We had such a solid plan. I should have known that life would present challenges once we got married and decided to start a family.  My mom has always said, "If you want to know if there is a god, make plans."  She was so right.