Hoo boy, that last entry was an emotionally derisive post, wasn't it? After a meltdown day, which I sort of intermittently sobbed my way through, I figured out why I was feeling so miserable. First, although it was much less taxing than I thought it'd be, Chinese New Year and all the visiting with relatives and their families (I don't need to explain that one, right?) Second, filling out the adoption pre-requisite forms. Third, being past ovulation, feeling absolutely normal, feeling hopeless because I felt so incredibly normal and getting my 24th straight resoundingly negative test.
24 consecutive negative tests! Sometimes after so many, you just want to rage, you are just so disbelieving that it will ever work. Who the hell gets 24 consecutive negative tests? What the heck is wrong with me? You would think by now that would be a rhetorical question, but it still reverberated around my head as I walked through the subway, where I passed four heavily pregnant women in my age group. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever get used to knowing that pregnancy is pretty easy and common. I just want to see one positive test, I thought, because we have tried so hard, for so long. I wish it wasn't me, I wish it didn't have to be me. It was so pathetic, of course it made me cry.
And so I had a good cry, then went out for a run and felt immeasurably better. I had this additionally pathetic thought — one day, when I look back, I may remember years 30-32 as the cry-once-a month years. If I forget, I guess I'll have this blog to remind me. That's the thing about infertility island.
The thing about 24 consecutive negative tests is that, after that many, you have to conclude that it is unlikely. I mean, really Unlikely, not maybe-a-miracle-some-month unlikely. I might be the 1% that gets to watch other women fall pregnant again, and again. Women who married after I did, women who are ten years older, women who just accidentally had sex, women who went to business school while we were trying. And of course, there's an anger there, it's the same anger that any 1% is going to feel and unlike some of those minorities, I'm neither dying nor disabled. So I guess what we've been getting to, through all this time, is what we are going to do about it. You can't fight without planning.
While I was on the train, meeting all these pregnant strangers, I asked myself again, do I feel strongly about pregnancy, because others can and do? Is it because I feel deep superiority, insecurity or competitiveness, or because I would otherwise feel that all my time, pain and money would have been for nothing? Or do I want to parent and have a carking desire to buy tuition books or trawl the web for art classes and projects?
Actually, neither of these sounded very appealing conclusions.
So I started again from more mechanical, and slightly less intangible, calculations. How old would I like to be when sending my child off to college? My initial answer was 50 but I won't make it in time. So maybe 53. This means that we should adopt by the time we are 35.
"Why 53?" my girlfriend wanted to know. "Because any older and we wouldn't be able to enjoy cycling around the campus and it takes some energy to buy a dorm-room fridge from Walmart. So it's a balance between being fair to the child and fun for me."
And that really was the most honest answer I could come up with — one almost laughably filled with assumptions, mutated of ideals and riddled with daydreams. But I guess infertility island is so imperfect, you have nothing but daydreams, assumptions anyway.
What is ideal and why? Is it donor eggs, or donor sperm (if indeed, that however unlikely, it's the hub's sperm which is causing embryo fragmentation) or adoption? We are fortunate that the cost is probably not an overriding factor, although it would soon escalate into one if I also had implantation issues. Many women have difficulties with carrying pregnancies. If we went out looking for some woman that resembled me and had good eggs, would it help my husband to know the baby as his biological own?
I'm not totally sure of that answer (who is, really?) but I am fairly confident he would accept both a biological or adopted child. Of course it stings that no one will ever tell you your child looks soo much like you, but really, after the initial joy of here she is, our first baby, does it really matter? Do you deal with poop, or discipline or their bleeding fingers after they clip them by sliding and slamming doors you repeatedly told them to leave alone, any better because you feel biologically connected?
Is it complicated, in that my husband's reactions might be hugely different depending on whether it's a girl or a boy? I just know this is going to come out sounding terribly judgemental and wrong, but my husband deeply wants a little girl, his little girl, which could be any little girl, from anywhere, but a boy only if it were the last available biological outcome. I on the other hand, would only prefer a biological child if it were a boy that looked like my husband.
Would it feel like a victory to me, or a compromise? Either way, unless it was a biological choice we shared, I don't have a desire to be pregnant, huge and have to push a bloody watermelon through my cervix. I grew up in gynaecology wards, thanks to what my dad did for work and right now, I'd be glad to never see the word gynaecological again in my life. I don't think it would help me feel more normal, or that this entire situation is normal.
Would either of us feel resentful if the physical characteristics of this child resembled a stranger? More importantly, would it be important to the child, to be birthed through "mummy" — would the concept of an odd, stray, adopted cytoplasmic egg be something that faded fairly quickly and be of diminishing interest, as long as they knew surely that they looked like Daddy and Mummy gave birth to them? Would it be better for them not to have any birth parents to go back to ("hello, you donated my egg, sounds a lot less pointed and damaging than hello, you are my parents who didn't bother with birth control and gave me away"). Giving an egg so your parents could have you sounds happy, noble, virtuous even, right?
That's my biggest conflict and it's actually a really parental one. I exalt this imaginary child so much that I already think of their self-esteem as vulnerable and priceless, more so than my own experience and beliefs. Because the thing is, I live in Asia. I work extensively and have benefitted off economies where parents can't afford to buy their children shoes. There are a lot of unwanted children and these children are already born into our world, earthquake-orphaned infants, who don't have a shot-in-hell in life, unless they find some way out of the drain that they are living in, by the side of a dirt road. Most of them won't.
The thought that, instead of giving a baby shoes and a college education, I go overseas and buy an egg, pay doctors to create this genetical mutant, go through a whale pregnancy and probably torturous labour, so that they can feel as normal as possible, is entirely subjective and parochial parental madness. I can't shake the feeling that it's not the right thing to do, but I would do it, just for the chance that it might make my child happier. I just can't fathom it.
But I dread that one future day, and the hurt and regret I might feel, if I wind up with a child of the "I did not know, until I lost it, how much my sense of identity was rooted in my knowledge of who my parents were" type. And if the adoption books are about that, I don't really want to read about it right now.
Then, there's the second conflict. Which is that, if we are adopting and you can adopt anytime, why now, or at 35 or for that matter, 40? It already feels like I've sacrificed so much and put my life and time on hold, whether unconsciously or otherwise, and this is before ever becoming a parent — why on earth would I plough back into it right now for the sake of worrying, sleepless nights and being even more sacrificial?
Wouldn't I rather be hedonistic? If there isn't a time limit after all, why is it necessary to even live here (a location decision we made based on work, family and support network for children, or the combination of all three and which we continued hanging about, in part because we were chasing this widely-conventional dream)? If you extend that analogy, without a child or without wanting a child right now, which isn't happening anyway, it isn't necessary to be married, or work, or live carefully, unless you want to.
If the dream is a daydream, then maybe I should just live my own, alternate dream. Wouldn't I rather live where there are national parks and brilliant weather, or widely varied friends who don't have children in tandem, so we could still accompany each other to spontaneous picnics and art shows? Where you don't know as many people and therefore life doesn't age with this formulaic routine, perspectives and challenges, the way it has felt for the last two years?
