Getting to Yes

When trying to make a baby, there naturally comes a point when you have to ask yourself if you're still in the game.

You have to ask how far you're willing to go to achieve what god or good biology or a few shots of tequila seem to have so easily bestowed on the swarm of buzzing parents all around you.

Like many couples, my husband and I have hit a few of those points over the past eight years.

When we both grew weary (and, quite frankly, chafed) from a rigorous schedule of well-orchestrated sex that refused to yield the intended results, we had to ask if we even wanted to have sex anymore. 

When we entered the machine of the medical infertility system, we had to ask how much biological manipulation we could endure. 

As our optimism waned in direct proportion to dollars spent on lab tests, obscure tonics, and acupuncture, we had to ask just how much of this agonizing desire to bear children we could afford.

The funny thing is, we didn’t even really get a chance to answer our own questions. Life, as it does, had other plans.

First, my father fell suddenly ill and I spent the better part of a year shuttling between Seattle and Chicago trying to keep him, his business, and his small white poodle alive. As complications and new illnesses accrued, my father's sanity slid away like fine sand.  

My sister and I tag-teamed from opposite coasts and made desperate decisions on his behalf. I stopped eating normal meals at normal times and grew unable to sleep without multiple aids. I made exhaustive checklists in an effort to reign in the creeping chaos of managing another person's life, and what seemed like his slow, awful undoing. 

Most days, it felt like being shot to a distant, unforgiving planet.

By no small miracle, my father survived nine interminable months as a patient. Once it became evident that managing live-in caregivers from afar was not going to work, and against the advice of pretty much everyone I knew, I moved him to a pleasant, new assisted living facility 10 minutes from my home.

I was already a changed person from the strain of the year we had both just barely endured, but little did I know what tender, transformative agonies were to come.

More medical crises followed, touching other, previously untouchable family members. People and dearly beloved pets died.

With my husband and I both new to self-employment and my energy drained steadily away from work, our cash flow, well, stopped flowing. Without ready resources of desire or even basic likeabilty,  sex was relegated to the stack of countless other, unessential to-do's. 

Like a fish tossed ashore by turbulent seas, our relationship flip, flop, floundered on the rocks.

By the time my own health took a nose dive, our formerly uncluttered life had become exhausting and strained. Five years into trying to get pregnant, we threw the white flag and surrendered our dream.

For the next two years, my husband and I clumsily, and with no small measure of resentment and rage, learned how to do marriage and life in new ways. 

While I battled chronic pain, fatigue, and my body's reluctance to process solid food, my husband succumbed to a vague yet seething depression. We took space, occupying separate floors of our small home for weeks at a time, and we took road trips, unraveling unspoken grief and failures along blank stretches of pavement and sky. 

We went to counseling and saw Buddhist shamans. We adopted an anxious pit bull and learned how to pray.

As our friends' kids turned five, six, and seven, we struggled to accept that ours was a childless fate.

Eventually, the dust began to settle. My body—all of me, really—began to heal as I committed to a whole new mode of self care. My husband found his way out of the basement and started being funny again. We painted the kitchen yellow and moved our bed close to the sweet birch tree in the attic.

Without dependents, besides the dog, to keep us tethered to our marriage, we still chose each other—again.

As 2013 dawned more hopeful than the handful of years past, I realized with a visceral urgency that we still had a decision to make. If we were not going to have a child, we needed to look that choice square in the face and be certain that we, and not some cruel vagaries of fate, were calling the shots.

I wasn't prepared for how difficult this would be. I guess I thought that after so much drama and time, the decision would be somehow straightforward, practical. We were already a couple years past 40 so it only made sense that we would be done with the idea. 

Our life had finally regained some levity and ease. We had money in the bank, and actually liked each other again. We were even better than before so many piles of shit had hit the fan.

Why rock the boat with the wildly uncertain, sleep-depriving prospect of a living, breathing human child?

As I pried my heart open to the possibility of mothering again, the grief of so much unrequited longing flooded back. All the dreams attached to peeing positive on a stick gnawed at my reason day and night. All the ways I judged my woman self for not performing the ultimate womanly act taunted me like packs of mean girls in junior high gym.

Relieved, I guess you could say, of the focus on becoming pregnant, my husband and I focused on becoming parents.

Like so many turning points before, we had to ask ourselves if we were still in the game. Did we still want it? Were we prepared to exert ourselves—and pay a small fortune—to become parents some other way?

“Yes” came swiftly once we started looking in the right place.

So here we are. We've spent the past eight months knee-deep in the world of adoption, making all new kinds of tough decisions. We submitted a mound of paperwork for our home study two weeks ago and the social worker is coming for our first home visit today. We expect to be in the pool, that is available to be matched with a birth mother, sometime in June.

I never would have planned it this way. Every day I dance with new fears of: When will the call come? What if it never comes? Who will it be? What in god's name are we thinking?! 

But when I'm quiet and in touch with the place within me that is to be trusted, that hard-won YES is all I hear. 

I imagine the adventure of this arrival has only prepared us for so many more exquisite, excruciating moments to come.