Category Archives: adoption

affirmative

Posted on by
Reply

I was in a pretty dark place the past few weeks, specifically with regard to adoption. Maybe dark is the wrong word. I was in a dimly-lit place. And there was pointy furniture everywhere that I kept ramming my shins into. Maybe there scary noises involved. My point: I was overwhelmed and not the most positive person. We had met with two agencies (one domestic, one international) and were no closer to deciding how to go about procuring a baby as when we first began.

And the money! And the time! I felt so outnumbered by the variety of factors that stood in our way. Should we sign with an agency? Should we adopt from Korea? Should we just wait a little longer to see if Jason’s sperm comes back? Is that a viable option or am I just in denial? Pregnancy had to be better than what we were going through. I could barely talk about adoption without dissolving into a puddle of tears.

Then I met Alyson. Our meeting was spontaneous and random, and we crammed more adoption talk into five minutes than I’ve ever talked about with my friends. She got what I was going through–all the frustration and negative feelings and high hopes–and it was a relief to not have to explain everything. It felt kind of affirming, like I was supposed to meet this woman for whatever reason.

I still get asked how adoption is going, and the answer is that there is no answer. We’re still in a holding pattern: waiting to choose an agency, saving money in the mean time. In the same breath, we’re enjoying our child-free lives. I will never take these days for granted. As much as I want to have children, I know that we’re not meant to have them right now. And that’s becoming more and more okay every day.

admission

Posted on by
Reply

For the past two years I’ve felt like life is happening to me instead of because of me. The changes have been forced upon me and I acted quickly, almost without thinking, to what was going on around me.

In the midst of everything, I haven’t been a very good friend to myself. Instead of addressing my sadness about his cancer and our infertility directly, I divert the story and fake optimism, mostly because when people ask how I’m doing it’s in a public place, and they don’t really care to get into the nitty gritty (and, if we’re being honest, neither do I. It’s so draining to be vulnerable all the time). When someone asks me how our meeting at the adoption agency went, I say “It went great. We got a lot of information. It’s a bit overwhelming, but we can do it.”

We can do it. I’m sure about that. But I’m tired of being asked how it’s going because it’s not going anywhere. First we need to save money, and then we will apply. We’re not going to save the full amount, but we need to have at least $5,700 before submitting our application. That day is a long way off. It’s akin to someone saying “Hey! You’re going to Disney Land! But not for another five years and also you have to pay for the whole thing yourself and before we can even book anything you’re going to need to pay for 1/4 of it in full, and even then it’s going to take about 3 years to actually buy tickets. So yay for you! Aren’t you excited to go to Disney Land?”

You shouldn’t be. Disney World is better.

the meeting

Posted on by
2

Firstly: we have raised over $1,000 towards our adoption! Hooray and thank you for all of your support and prayers.

Secondly: We went to Portland on Friday to meet with an adoption agency.
We loved them.

The director of the program spent over an hour giving us information about the process and we left certain we were doing the right thing. The organization is non-profit so the overhead is low and the fees are lower than they would be elsewhere. It’s still going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000, but it could be worse by a long shot.

Before we apply we want to raise enough to cover the application fee (done!), home study, two seminars, and a program fee, which is about $5700. Our plan is to save/raise that, and then apply. We do not want to go into debt to adopt. If it takes three years to save enough money, then it will take three years. Hopefully it will not, but we’d rather wait until the time was right and we are financially ready to pursure adoption than take out loans to rush the process along. It’s irresponsible.

That said, it could take up to two years for placement to happen, and if it takes us three years to save the money, that’s 5 more years of waiting. Remember when I just pretended to be all Adullt-Like and Responsible? I feel conflicted: on the one hand I want to save our pennies and begin the process when we’re in a position to do so; on the other, PLEASE TO HAVE A CHILD RIGHT NOW THANK YOU KINDLY. There is the childish part of me that wants a golden ticket now, daddy! But alas. There’s absolutely nothing I can do to make things go any faster. It’s frustrating, and while I mostly have a positive attitude, sometimes I want to throw a tantrum: a full-blown kicking and screaming cursefest, completely with the ugly cry and possibly biting and hair-pulling. I know it will be a long and arduous process. I know that the frustration I’m experiencing now is the just the tip of the emotional iceberg.

I’m glad that Jason and I are doing this together. There isn’t one of us that is more interested or more proactive. I am so lucky that I picked a solid husband. It makes the tough times so much easier: when I get stressed and sad, he is there to remind me that not everything has to be done right this second. I love that balance. He’ll be a great father.

If you would like to donate to our adoption fund, please visit our ChipIn page!

in three parts

Posted on by
1

Earlier this week I had to help restrain a three year old who had burned his hand. The doctor needed to pull off the dead, damaged skin so the new skin would have room to grow. It was a struggle to keep him contained and it took three adults to do so. He cried during the entire procedure (which couldn’t have been more than seven minutes), screaming that it was “time to go bye-bye” and he didn’t want to be there. My heart broke into about fourteen pieces, but what stuck out to me most is the boy’s father, who held his hand was reassured him the whole time. There were some instances where the kiddo was squirming so much and crying so hard that he couldn’t see his dad. He immediately started screaming “I WANT MY DADDY!” and the second he said it, his father gripped his face and looked into his eyes and said “I’m here, buddy. I’m right here.”

I loved that little boy then, so scared in the newness and pain of the situation. When I was younger I had to get staples in my head, and the only thing that made me not cry too hard was how hard I was holding my father’s hand. There’s a certain peace that a child finds in the hands of a father, and I think one of the defining moments of Jason’s relationship with our child will be the day he has to be there when she’s scared and hurting, finding comfort in the familiar hands of her dad.

* * * * * *

Most everyone I talk to is supportive about our adoption, but if I had to choose a comment I hear more than any other it would be “I’d be scared I wouldn’t love the adopted kid enough.” I can appreciate their candor; I try to be understanding, but I really don’t get understand. The more they try to explain, the more insulted I feel. I’m in full attack mode, ready to defend a child I don’t even have yet.

* * * * * *

Before we moved to our house, we lived next door to two of the greatest people ever. Mark and Cathi were fantastic neighbors; they kept an eye on our apartment when we were out of town and we fed their cats when they weren’t home. I was thrilled when Cathi announced that she was pregnant, and even more thrilled when, on Saturday, she went into labor.

Jason and I were walking to the hospital and I turned to him and said “This is kind of like a test, you know? I mean, you know how I was saying that I kept getting the “what if you don’t love the child you get” question? Well. Right now we are about to go meeting a newborn, and even though he’s the son of our friends, I think it’ll be a good litmus test for adoption. Like, if we don’t even like our friends’ baby there’s no way we’ll love a baby we don’t even know, you know? Does that make sense?”

It (sort of) made sense at the time, but in hindsight it made no sense whatsoever. I don’t believe you can hold a newborn child and not love it to pieces the first time you sniff his head. To tell me that you’re worried you won’t love a baby is like saying that you’re worried a rainbow will collapse your house. There’s not one piece of logic to that statement whatsoever.

If you’d like to donate to our adoption fund, please go to our ChipIn page. Any other inquiries can be directed to dashleysteele@gmail.com.

stuff and things

Posted on by
2

1) We’re raised over $850 dollars to our adoption fund so far. Twenty-two people have contributed over $850.

You folks blow me away, not only because people have actually donated, but because of all of the support we’ve gotten. Brandi has a side bar dedicated to us. I feel famous whenever I visit her page. Amy updates her status about this fund at least once a week.

If you’d like to contribute, please visit our ChipIn page to make a donation. Prefer ye olde regular mail? You can email me at dashleysteele@gmail.com for our address.

2) Speaking of finances: we’re taking a 13 week Dave Ramsey course at church. We’ve done one week so far and it’s been pretty interesting. We don’t have huge amounts of debt, but we’d obviously like to pay off what we do owe (student loans, one car, a house) as fast as possible. So! We enrolled in this class and we’ll see what happens.

3) I started reading Woman, Food, and God yesterday and haven’t been able to put it down. The author makes some interesting insights regarding how our perception if food is linked to our beliefs about ourselves, others, even God. It’s not a religious book, really, and the idea of God expressed in the book is more of an acceptance that there is something bigger and lovely that we do not understand, and that we hold this notion of God inside us as well.

4) I have a royal tooth. I got a crown. It hurt kind of a lot because I didn’t want him to numb my entire jaw. I had a lunch date and needed to be able to chew food and not my lip, so he only gave me enough to take the edge off. Imagine a dentist sticking a pokey device onto your exposed tooth root. That’s exactly what it was, and it hurt as much as you’re picturing. Up side: the numbness did subside in enough time for my lunch date.

5) We are gardening fools. Much yard work has been accomplished over the past three weekends. I will post pictures. We got a fancy camera that takes good pictures and as soon as I figure out how to get them off of said camera, you will be privy to them.

6) Bridesmaids is hilarious. Please go see it.

100 pennies, 20 nickels, 10 dimes, four quarters

Posted on by
7

I initially had mixed emotions when our friend Amy said she’d like to put together a ChipIn page for our adoption fund. My first reaction was gratitude, obviously, because if someone is going to volunteer to start raising money so you can buy a baby then you’d better be thankful (note: every. single. adoption site is very clear that one is not “buying a baby” when they pay the fees; that the money is, in fact, just fees. Because buying babies is illegal. I DO NOT WANT TO BUY A BABY. I am in no way interested in monetarily procuring a child).

So.
Where I was going was this: adoption is expensive. Perhaps you’ve already figured out that what I hope to do with this entry is raise some fundage so we don’t have take out a second mortgage or hold eighty-seven thousand bake sales. Despite my ability to make a pretty mean red velvet cupcake, it would get old after a while, and I may have to use every available tube of red food coloring on earth, and that’s not fun for anyone. What I am hoping, gentle reader, is that you might help take some of the financial strain off of us by donating some money.

Perhaps a back story is in order, as I do not expect you to willy nilly shell out your hard earned dough to strangers without first hearing why it would be much appreciated.

My husband and I cannot have children. It’s an issue we discovered after he had a testicle removed due to a cancerous tumor that had taken up residence inside of it. After paying for the surgery and subsequent chemotherapy, our finances were severely limited. We eventually paid them all off – we even bought a house – but it was only after the home purchase was well underway that we discovered he had a zero sperm count. His other testicle, for whatever reason, was incapable of producing even one lone swimmer.

There hasn’t been as much research done on male infertility, so there aren’t a lot of options with regards to reversing his low sperm count. One option is in-vitro fertilization, but after careful consideration of all of the costs involved (not only financial, but emotional and physical as well), we decided it wasn’t the right course of action for us. What was left was adoption.

I hate phrasing it like that, like adoption is a last resort. It’s not. We just figured that we would have a biological child first. Perhaps everyone does. What I know now, though, is that adoption is the absolute right choice for us. We will be giving a home to a child that might otherwise not have one; we’re giving another option to a woman who would, for one reason or another, not parent her child. In turn, that child will be giving us the opportunity to be the best parents we can be. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

That’s where you come in. I am asking you to donate one dollar to our fund. That’s all. I’m hoping, that with enough support and word-of-mouth and guest entries (which I will gladly write), we’ll be able to get a gigantic amount of contributors who have donated a mere dollar. How great would it be to see “15,000 contributors have donated $15,000″? You can donate more than that if the Spirit moves you, but what we’re asking for is a dollar. We’re also asking that you pass this post along, chain letter style, except instead of good luck, you’ll be helping us become parents. I might even bake a cupcake or two, should you desire one.

If you’d like more information regarding our adoption, please email me at dashleysteele@gmail.com

my understanding

Posted on by
2

When we signed the papers for our house on April 1, we were under the impression it would take a few more days for the sellers to sign and then the funds to be transferred. We were assured we would have the keys by no later than April 6th.

April 6th has come and gone, as well has April 7th and 8th and 9th and 10th and 11th. We’re still in our apartment and it’s still full of boxes and the longer I look at them the more I want to burn everything out of frustration. We’re no closer to getting the keys than we were last week and it all has to do with the bank. The bank that holds the second mortgage on the property is waiting for a letter from whomever that states their payout when the sale closes. So really it all has to do with the grand United States Postal Service. Why someone can’t just email the letter or scan over a PDF is beyond me. This is 2011, right? Not the days of Ye Olde Pony Express. Who mails things anymore? Banks, apparently. Because they’re trying to kill me.

We bought a home we cannot enter. I feel like we’re getting Punk’d.

* * * * *

Jason and I met with his urologist who ordered a blood test to determine the origin of his lack of swimmers. The blood test would determine the amount of sperm-making hormones in his blood. The skinny: if a certain hormone level in his blood was normal, it would indicate a blockage in one of the sperm tubes which could be corrected with surgery. If certain hormone levels in his blood were high we’d have to do in vitro fertilization in order to conceive.

We went back and forth between not wanting to know and wanting to know. We had been discussing adoption since we found out that Jason’s sperms weren’t so much swimming as they were lying around in his lonley ball. The more we talked about adoption the more excited we became. We were reading books and talking to adoptive couples and researching agencies. We were quite confident that this was the right choice for us and now someone was telling us that the infertility might be fixable. I felt equal points devestated and hopeful, and for reasons I do not understand, I was pissed that it was even correctable.

I do not know why he did the blood test. I mean, he did it with my blessing and everything so it’s not like he was all sneakily giving away bodily fluid. But the reasoning behind why we did the blood test at all is beyond my scope of understanding. We did it because we wanted to know. If it was just a blockage, then… and if it wasn’t, well.

Neither one was fantastic: Jason was hesitant to have his junk operated on again and we knew that we did not want to undergo in-vitro, so we were in a rock and a hard place, kind of. We would just wait for the results and then make a decision. The hormones levels were through the roof, which meant we didn’t really have to make a decision at all.

This whole big thing has been supremely overwhelming, and I realized that instead of addressing my feelings about infertility and adoption head-on like a big girl, I was turning to food to make me feel better. It rarely worked, but I have been doing it for so long that I knew no other way to cope with the stress of homebuying and adoption and everything else in life that seems to just get compounded. I can go for a week or two and be perfectly fine, and then someone asks “So when are you going to have kids?” or some idiot complains about her pregnancy on Twitter and I feel like I’m back at square one.

Infertility is a strange experience, and so far I have experienced a full gamut of emotions, ranging from rage to bliss. It’s that funny in-between sadness part that makes me uncomfortable and unable to cope with anything, that makes me want to do nothing but sit around and eat junk food all day. I feel like moving into our house will occupy my time and give us something to do besides dwell on our infertility issues, and the longer it takes to get our keys, the more stressed out I feel, the more I feel the need to shove any salty, sugary boatload of crap down my throat.

It’s about control, really. That fact is not lost on me. I am not in control of anything that’s going on right now. I never pictured myself as one of those people that had to be in control of anything but it’s becoming more and more apparent that I liked when tI was the one who could call and get answers. Rightnow I feel so blindly, permanently out of control that I am completely beside myself with no idea how to fix it.

how i got over it

Posted on by
3

Two weeks ago we learned we wouldn’t have children that shared our DNA.
And it sucked.
A lot.

Now it sucks less, for reasons I don’t quite understand and that are a bit complicated to articulate. The sting of the news gradually became less and less painful, and then it was replaced with excitement, joy, and the sweet relief that I wouldn’t lose bladder control. It took a lot of talking and crying and more talking and even more crying. I drowned my sorrows in sandwiches and sleep, Kleenex and conversation.

Talking through my grief has always helped me. When Jason was diagnosed with cancer, the surgery and all that followed happened so quickly that nothing really sank in until his last round of chemotherapy, almost a full two months after he’d had surgery. Talking about it helped. Explaining what was going on to friends and family and strangers really allowed me to fully deal with it. Comforting others turned out to be very comforting to me. Explaining procedures and medication deepened my knowledge of what was going on, and after saying “97% cure rate” over a zillion times, I came to understand that he would be fine. He would live a normal, healthy life and while he would have to get check ups and scans and blood work every three months for the next five years, the likelihood of the cancer coming back was minuscule. When his urologist first told us he had cancer, I freaked out, as one tends to do. My mind immediately went from “oh, it’s just surgery for a benign tumor, no problem” to “I AM GOING TO HAVE TO BUY FOUR DOZEN CATS BECAUSE MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO DIE AND LEAVE ME ALONE.” It was a very dramatic fifteen minutes.

Coping with his infertility was not much different, though it did not take months to get over. I found that the more people I told, the less it hurt to verbalize. The more Jason and I talked about adoption, the more excited we both became. Having to defend our position to friends and family really helped cement our beliefs. We would not pursue fertility treatments. We would adopt.

I haven’t really talked about our religious beliefs in this blog, but it’s because of them that we’ve so quickly come to terms with what is happening in our lives. Regardless of how we think our lives should play out, the hard truth is that things don’t always go my way. I did not choose for Jason to get cancer, but he did. I did not choose for his remaining testicle to be a barren wasteland of doom, but it is. It was sad and so we mourned, but we moved on because the loss of not being able to procreate does not make the rest of my life meaningless. I am help to no one if all I can do is talk about how depressed and frustrated and isolated I feel. I don’t feel that way because my life is not my own, and the things that happen to me don’t define my identity or my place in this world. In the end, we’re all chosen by God to make His family. That realization made it so much easier to play the hand I was dealt, and to play it with joy instead of obligation.

Our children will be our children, genetics be damned, and we will go out and find them and bring them home.