Musings of a Marfan Mom

Lots of thoughts going through my head tonight. As I rest up from the surgery I’ve had a lot of time to sleep (hellooooo waking up at 11:30 this morning – who does that?!) but also to read adoption stuff. Like, I’ve been reading The R House from the beginning of (highly recommend this blog!), and posts from another blog or two, and updating our adoption blog and checking the stats on our agency’s profile.

I just kind of feel all over the place. I read a great post by a woman with fertility issues who had two biological children before she and her husband tried adoption, and she talked about not really being “fertile” and not really being “infertile” and it made me cry because that is exactly how I feel. I am grateful every single day for the opportunity to have M and J. I realize that not every woman with Marfan (or even every woman, period) is able to have a pregnancy. Adoption is not a “second choice” to us. I always knew I wanted to try to adopt, I always knew I could not have as many biological kids as we might want – if we had any – and adoption just felt right. But at the same time, so much of my pregnancies were out of my control: when to get pregnant, who my doctors were, where I delivered, how I delivered, who was with me. And I feel bad about it, but sometimes I still feel frustrated at people who appear to take that for granted, that they can just have kids as they want and more or less how they’d like to. Does that make sense? And now we’re hoping to be able to adopt and everything is out of our control again, and I sometimes feel guilty because I have had the opportunity to have two beautiful boys and so maybe I should just be content with that because some people can’t have biological children at all, but there is this hole in my heart that cries to be a mother one more time.

And then I worry, are we doing enough to be found by a mother or parents who want an adoption plan for their child? I read blog posts by birth mothers and adoptive parents alike who felt like their match was perfect, like they were meant to find each other, and I want that. If we get chosen, I want a relationship with our child’s birth family, to be friends with them and see them from time to time. So many of the blogs I’ve read talk about how it was this chance meeting that people were paired…an expectant mother happened upon a profile somewhere, a case manager had a thought, whatever. And I guess it’s hard sometimes to have faith that what will be will be, you know? Because the only thing I can control about this is putting ourselves out there, so I latch on to that because I’ll admit it: I have a hard time giving up control. But even as I try to spread the word, I feel guilty/awkward because I fully realize that our family being completed requires the disruption of another family, and how can I wish for that? So, at night when I pray, I pray for the mothers/couples who are trying to decide what is best for them and their children, and I pray that I will be ok with whatever happens to our family.

Maybe this whole straddling the two worlds and the experiences we’re having is to teach us (me) to be able to give up control. Maybe. I know it’s a lesson I should learn regardless. (I am not a believer that everything happens for a reason, but perhaps that we can choose our own lessons from everything that happens?) It’s a hard lesson to learn though (obviously, or I probably wouldn’t have had all the thoughts in this post!). I’m not sure I’ll ever be perfect at it.

And now it’s past 2 am and I have to be up in about 5 hours because a teen from our church is coming in the morning to help me with the kids and I should probably shower and have clothes on before she comes over.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my dancing-in-the-living-room-in-their-PJs boys, because they make me smile 🙂