Becoming a Parent

I've been drafting a post for sometime now - but I'm having trouble expressing it all with any brevity.

I used to scour blogs for hours looking for women who had miscarried multiple times and went on to have successful pregnancies. Many of them have. However, for the most part, they had chromosomal issues in one or more of the previous pregnancies. Or they had Factor V Leiden and went on heparin. Or they had a correctable issue with their uterus. The other women continued to miscarry until they stopped trying to get pregnant with their own eggs or moved on to adoption. I feared these women. I didn't want to be them. I didn't want to give up and adopt. I didn't want the consolation prize.

My mind, however, is changing on that front. I read Dan Savage's The Kid (highly recommend) and am currently reading A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents. The husband and I have attended no less then three events about adoption in the past week. We are feeling good. We are feeling positive. It doesn't feel like a consolation prize at all. It feels like a godsend.

We're going to work with Doctor Superman, but we've given ourselves a deadline. At the deadline, we're marching over to the adoption agency and submitting the application.

We like the certainty of international adoption. In many countries, it's a fairly streamlined system. The wait is known, the travel time is known, the approximate age-range is known. At this point, we're leaning towards Korea - which has some of the best foster and medical care for their children who are waiting for adoption. We also have a good chance of knowing something about our son's (mostly boys from Korea) history - which is important to us. The husband and I are committed to attending Korean cultural events with our child, of sending him to culture camps during the summer, of trying to recognize, appreciate, keep a sense of where he came from. But we recognize our inability to completely do so. On that front, we've been joking around about our teenage son coming home with his friends and being mortified because his geeky very white parents are sitting around the house in traditional Korean garb, eating traditional Korean food and speaking to each other in Korean (learned from our intensive Korean language course at the New School, of course). As many internationally adopted kids are - he may have little interest in his birth country until he reaches adulthood. But we want those options out there for him.

It's the first time I've felt truly excited and happy when thinking about our future as parents in the past three years. For the first time, I've realized that with time, I will parent a child. And it feels fantastic.