This may be TMI for some of you, so if the title makes you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this entry.
Yesterday I could feel a UTI coming on, so I called the doctor. My regular doctor was booked for the next 2 weeks, so I decided to go to an urgent care clinic instead. I did the usual pee-in-cup test and then waited around to get a prescription. When the doctor came in, she said that my suspicions about the infection were correct and that the pregnancy text came back negative. Pregnancy test? Didn’t remember asking for that.
I laughed and explained that I could have told her that.
“Have you been trying to conceive?” she asked.
"If you call three years of unprotected hanky-panky trying, I guess so,” I replied.
I explained a little about my situation; that we valiantly tried, found out it’s highly unlikely, and that we are now pursuing adoption.
She then went on for the next 15 minutes telling me that it could still happen someday. She told me stories of people she knows who tried for years and then one day “it” just happened. She threw in a few, “but families are made all different kinds of ways.” But she’d always go back to trying to give me hope that I could get pregnant.
I know she meant well. But after trying so hard to get pregnant, and then deciding adoption is the path to be on, the thought of trying to get pregnant makes me cringe. Yes, I do want to experience what it’s like to grow another human being inside of me. And I definitely want to be a mommy. But trying to conceive for so long definitely takes a toll—mentally, physically, emotionally. It’s like running a marathon and then finding out you took a wrong turn and now have to go run it all over again—but you have no idea where you made the wrong turn and the odds of finding the right course are slim-to-none.
Plus, I truly feel that adoption is the path Sam and I should be on right now. It's the path we want to be on right now. It is an answer to our prayers. Instead of hoping for a positive pregnancy test, we hope for a birth mother to find us. So when people make comments about me getting pregnant, it feels like it's undermining our adoption plans. And again, I know they mean well. But while pregnancy has it's own unique gifts, so does adoption.
