[AUTHOR'S NOTE: My wife has done an auspiciously better job of detailing how far we've come in this process than I ever could in her own blog, The Truesdale Times, so please check it out as well - http://thetruesdaletimes.blogspot.com/]
"When are you going to have a baby?"
"You guys do want kids, right?"
"How much longer are you going to wait before you start a family?"
"You're going to be an old dad!"
I don't know that people understand how offensive or otherwise poorly timed their words can be. I can't count the number of instances where the questions above, or a variation on them, have been posed to my wife & I since we've been married. (I'm so jaded about it that I'm at a point where when I hear of a couple being pregnant, especially through some cutesy, staged announcement, my reaction is to smile and mutter a very sternly worded assault of their character, occasionally sprinkled with expletives, under my breath.) They've come from members of our family, friends, and people we barely know. The answer was always the same for us: "We've been trying - so whenever it happens, it happens." We were putting on a good face, as it were.
Except nothing happened. At least not what we were expecting to happen.
I've had a difficult time of convincing myself that I should write about this, mainly because it's a topic that involves some of the most painful realizations I've ever had to deal with. I wasn't sure I wanted to share those moments with anyone other than my wife, for various reasons all of which I'll leave to you, dear reader, to interpret for yourselves. Even so, I find that the path we're on now is one best not walked alone. For that reason, I am putting pen to paper - or finger to keyboard, as is actually the case - in an attempt to convey what I, we have been through in the process of building a family.
After my wife & I got married in May of 2010, we were living in a house in Orangeburg, South Carolina that I'd been renting since I moved into town back in February of 2008. It was a good bachelor pad and more than enough room for one person, but neither of us wanted to live there forever as we both had dreams of owning our own home, somewhere that we could settle into and enjoy as it would be ours, not just a space we happened to be inhabiting. My wife waited patiently as I asked her to give me two years to work on getting to a place financially where I felt like we'd have more stability. Truth be told, I had a plan in mind; first would come the house, then we would work on our family (not to say a baby wouldn't have been welcome before then, just that in my head that's the way it would've panned out best). Call it a blessing, clairvoyance, or just dumb luck but we closed on our house June 1, 2012.
So I needed an extra month. Sue me.
It was time to get down to business, and that became a problem for me.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here. Making love is awesome - or at least it should be. When it becomes a chore, you know something is wrong. And in my mind, when we were trying our hardest to get pregnant the whole thing lost its appeal. Sex had become not something we were doing for fun anymore, instead it was this thing we were doing because we had to and in my head that made it less desirable. It wasn't that I wasn't attracted to my wife, it was the stress and the pressure from the mindset of, "Okay, we've got to get this done now...If it doesn't happen now, people are going to keep bugging us about it and even though we're never going to live up to their expectations we have to do this or else we've failed as a couple."
Notice the word failed there. I'm not afraid of many things. I'm old enough to have a sense of logic that affords me the comfort of being able to differentiate between what's worthy of fear and what isn't. Failure never has been kind enough to make itself so conveniently sorted. The fear of having done all that I could and still come up short has always haunted me, ever since I was a child. I had terrible stomach cramps when I was in college because I had put myself into a position of being incredibly fearful about whether or not I'd be able to perform (I'd say taking advanced courses in logic and mathematics would be enough to upset most people's stomachs). I still deal with it to this day. It's a debilitating feeling, trust me. People act surprised when I tell them about this because they say I don't have the outward expression of someone who's constantly tied in knots. I guess I've dealt with it long enough that I hide it well, or at least better than others.
That said, the fear of failing in this particular instance was getting to me, mainly because I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what was going wrong or how it could be remedied. My wife had been off of birth control for a while and we'd had no luck as of yet. She was doing all that she knew to do, going so far as to take prenatal vitamins and at-home ovulation tests (she even had an app on her tablet that was supposed to help predict when she'd be at her most fertile, for crying out loud). It dawned on the both of us that we were getting to a point where we would have to look into the possibility of there being medical reasons as to why we weren't seeing any results.
My parents got divorced when I was very young and the only father-figure I had growing up was my Grandfather. Unfortunately, he passed away when I was 12 and as I grew up there was a hole in my life that never quite got filled. I've made it known in previous blog entries that there was a point in time where I didn't believe in the concept of marriage and that I thought I'd never get married. I think the desire to be a father set upon me around the same time that I became mature enough to put away those beliefs. I knew in my mind that I wanted to give a child (or children) the sort of love, guidance and upbringing that I had but in a complete, whole family setting. It had become a dream, the desire to someday go out in public with pride while wearing one of those baby slings you see dads wearing - you know, the kind where the baby is more or less strapped to the guy's chest or back? I wanted to be that guy, in the worst way.
Jill and I finally did consult with a specialist regarding the issues we'd been having in trying to get pregnant, and it broke my heart when we found out that it would be all but impossible for us to conceive a child of our own.
We had picked out names for our children, one for a boy and one for a girl.
To have a dream taken from you is one of the most painful things a person can ever experience. The hurt from that news is still there, to this day. The questions, the wonder about why this happened to us, the urge to shake my fist at the sky and scream with every bit of anger I could possibly muster - all still there and probably not going away any time soon. (I am saddened by the many prospects that were dashed by this turn of events but what weighs most heavily on me now is that the bloodlines of our families will end with us. That's a medieval concept, I know. I've just not been able to shake the hurt from that.) But life goes on, with or without you, and so has our effort to build a family.
We have talked openly about the idea of adopting at least as long as we've been married. It wasn't a stretch for us to discuss that opportunity, what with my wife having a background in social work and several cousins who were adopted. However, I'll admit that I never thought we'd actually pursue it because I didn't think we'd have no other option when it came to growing our family. I know that could sound harsh but the reality of the matter is that adoption prior to now, in my mind, would've been an effort of last resort. As it would turn out, it was always our best option.
Around the end of September, we began the process of getting involved with an organization called Heartfelt Calling which is associated with the South Carolina Foster Parent Association and the South Carolina Department of Social Services. Prospective applicants have the option of being foster parents, foster-to-adopt, or adoptive parents and we at least for now have chosen to take the latter route. We received an application packet from them, which was just shy of the thickness of your average textbook. It goes without saying that the sort of information they gather on prospective adoptive parents is vast (a background check complete with fingerprints, financial reports, a floor plan of our home with an evacuation route, proof of our dog's vaccination records, etc.), and not all of it was necessarily the sort of data you'd expect to have to submit. Apparently it was vital that they know my cholesterol levels as I had to have blood work done in order to get every piece of information required for the application to be completed. As of this writing, I believe the only portions of the application that haven't been turned in are reference letters from a few of our friends (if you're reading this, and you know who you are, GET ON THE BALL).
The paperwork was tedious and time consuming, and so too have been the classes we've had to attend. There's an old joke about how some people should be forced to take a training course before they can be parents. As it turns out, in certain cases, that's exactly what you have to do. When talking about them, I've referred to the trio of classes we've attended as Parenting 101, 102, and 103. Combined, we wound up spending about 20-25 hours in a classroom setting. (None of the meetings we've had to attend have been nearby; even though we're closer to Columbia than Charleston, a majority of the sessions we've had to attend have been in the Low Country, meaning we've sacrificed our free time and put a good amount of miles on our vehicles these past few months as well.) Fortunately the classes weren't a pass/fail scenario as all we had to do was show up and participate in order to receive credit. They weren't so much curriculum-based in regard to teaching people how to be parents or even better parents; they were sessions geared towards preparing prospective foster or adoptive parents for the kind of children who find themselves in this system (kids with disabilities, who have been abused or neglected, or what have you) and the associated issues that they may encounter as a result of inviting such children into their home.
This process of completing paperwork and going to class is leading up to our eventually being licensed to serve as adoptive parents. There's another aspect to all of this which involves in-home inspections and home studies. Thus far we've worked with the local Department of Health and Environmental Control and we're waiting to be seen by the fire marshal as well as a home study to be conducted by DSS.
Prior to the DHEC inspection we went about making a series of changes to our home - "child-proofing", as it were. The cabinetry locks were simple to add as they slip over your existing knobs and handles, however let me be frank in saying that I highly doubt the people who design the drawer latches we purchased have ever had to install them. Those things were an absolute nightmare to get into place because the cabinets we have are made from material that evidently was never intended to be modified. We got them in, though, albeit not without the usage of a variety of colorful metaphors, as Spock would call them.
We emptied out the storage spaces underneath our kitchen and bathroom sinks, tossing out a fair amount of clutter in the process, then gathered together all of our cleaning supplies. Our laundry room is more like a closet than a room as it's situated in the main hallway of our home and features a set of double doors. A friend of mine had shared an article with me on life-hacks a few weeks prior and in it was an idea about using over-the-door shoe organizers to keep all your cleaning supplies together and in one place. This was a brilliant concept for us as we were able to use the organizers and that closet to effectively secure every cleaning product we have.
My wife and I came to the conclusion that the term "child-proofing" is an absolute misnomer. It doesn't matter how thorough you may be or how many precautions you may take, kids are going to hurt themselves because they don't know any better. That's not a bad thing, though. It's how they learn about the world around them. I did it, she did it, we've all done it - we're all still here and more or less intact. One has to hope, as a parent, that dropping a TV on their heads isn't part of the learning process.
We made sure to cover a few other random items before DHEC had their way with our home, such as verifying that the temperature of our hot water didn't exceed 120°, that the refrigerator was at an appropriate level of chill, and that our firearms were stored in locked containers away from their ammunition (because a gun purchased with the intent of being used as home defense is useful in that scenario). Our home has a septic tank and so the inspector would have to walk over it as well - I assume the idea there being that you're in the clear so long as they don't see a puddle of turds and toilet paper in your yard. We felt like we knew what to expect because we were working off of a cheat sheet that had been given to us as part of the applicant packet.
As I expected it would, the DHEC inspection went off without a hitch. (I will add that we did something of a mad-dash cleaning of the house the night before as we were running short on time with all we had going on the week of the inspection.) What can I say, I was confident in the work we'd done. By some odd turn of events, it happened that my wife and the inspector had been acquaintances in college as they were both students at Winthrop University. He was thorough, nevertheless, as he did all the things we had counted on and he even went so far as to check our window blinds in order to determine if they were a variety that could potentially contain toxic metals (that wasn't on the cheat sheet). We were in the clear all around, though, as he signed off on our home without encountering any potential issues.
At present, we need to work on getting a fire extinguisher (which has to be mounted to a wall in our kitchen - I'm not thrilled about that, to be honest) and a carbon monoxide detector as the next phase of this process will involve the fire marshal inspecting our home. I didn't mention this earlier, but part of the applicant packet was a worksheet wherein we had to submit measurements of the openings of our windows. I forget what the specification was but ours appeared to have been up to snuff. It wasn't explained to us as to why the windows needed to be a certain size. I assumed it was to insure they were adequate evacuation ports; this is true but as it turns out there's also a consideration here for whether or not a firefighter wearing SCUBA would be able to get in through that same space. That's an example of the kind of thing that wouldn't cross an average person's mind unless you're being made to endure a process like this.
To that end, it's rather mind-boggling to think about what we've been through so far. We've jumped through one hoop after another in order to confirm that we're fit to be parents whereas there are people in this world having babies every day who don't want them and won't love them. It doesn't seem fair, is what I'm getting at. I'm a natural cynic and I can't help but express these feelings.
Regardless, we are where we are and we know where we're going, and that's what we will continue to focus our efforts upon. Building a family, one day at a time.
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