Motherhood

I am enchanted with the PBS series Call the Midwife.  Every time a baby is born in that show - every episode, really - my eyes fill up with tears.  It moves me.  The mothers, the babies, the anguish, the relief, the miracle.  I wonder if I could do it, give birth, that is, and think that I probably could although I probably never will.

But I am a mother.

I recognize that now and am becoming more comfortable with saying it.  I am a mom!  My little Allie Allie Alligator is my baby girl.  At first, it felt strange thinking of myself as a mom or even hearing others say it.  The title, placed on me, felt like trying on a stiff evening gown.  I thought the word "mom" would feel like a nice comfortable sweater, but I think with time it becomes just that.  Acting as a mom, though, it is wonderful.  Who would have ever thought?  But I think sometimes that I'm a natural.  It just feels like our home and hearts and minds are ripe and ready and so caring for our little Allie feels so fun.

Of course, at first, she cried a lot.  Tight fists, raised in the air shaking.  I couldn't figure out her schedule.  I really, really wanted someone to tell me what her schedule was supposed to be.  What time to eat?  How many ounces?  What time should she nap?  How long?  I really didn't know and I felt desperate for the answers.  But the answer is, I have come to find out, that you figure it out.  And I did.  Little by little, you just figure it out.  The way she rubs her eyes or yawns or starts, out of the blue, to communicate with her cries that she's ready.

She's just amazing too!  She has all of these tricks.  I was never that impressed with other children's ability to grow, but to see it up close and personal, it really is...amazing.  Oh the things she's learned!  I remember how she sucked in air/gasped - I thought she was choking a lot, but it was just her latest trick!  Blowing air with her lips...leading to spitting out any food she doesn't like (she's obsessed with bananas).  Giggling as we give her raspberries on her little round belly.  Heh-heh-heh-ing.  Oh, and lifting herself up and down with her little legs.  And she just starting independently saying "ba ba bah" and even doing that when she's fussy.  Oh, it's like this little conversation she's having.  It's just amazing, really amazing!!!

Let me tell you how it warms my heart the way Obed interacts with her.  It's pure love.  He adores her.  We adore her.  She really does bring so much joy to our life.  So many pure moments of sweetness, of catching ourselves laughing or smiling or looking at her with warmth and love.  We are a family.

Witnessing trust

One of my cherished memories is when we were giving a bath to a little one and he got scared and started to cry. We spoke to him like we always do, letting him know that everything was okay. He stopped crying. It blew me away that he trusted us to, in his little way, bravely move forward. It makes me want to cry just thinking about it.  I was a witness to how his little trust muscles were working - to trust us!  We were the object of his trust.  It blew me away.  It still does. 

I also remember when we Becky first rushed up to us at church, to tell us the story of how she picked us - from faces on an adoption profile - to be his adoptive parents.  It was a rush of joy, of emotion, or trying to move my mind fast enough to capture and register every marvelous and heart-bursting thing she was saying.  In the middle of the dizzying emotion and with tears in my eyes, I asked if I could hold Dean.  I was asking if I could hold my son!  She held him out and I took him in and - and it had been years since I had held a baby and so I was a little scared that he would cry or I would hold him awkwardly, giving away my secret that I had always fumbled babies in the past and really didn't know anything about being a mother - but his light body bobbed for a minute in my arms and then his head fell into my neck and rested there.  Warm and soft and right.  

That smart little one!!  He was giving me a sign.  He was communicating with the sweetest and most potent of tools, letting me know that I was okay.  That he wanted me as much as I wanted him.  That he would let me in to his little world.  

What a gift. 

Love hurts.

Love hurts.

Of course it does.  It tugs, as they say, at our heart strings.  Tug: it can all be taken away.  Tug: There are no guarantees.  Tug: you can't control the situation.  

But love!  How good (and scary) it feels!  How intense (and fragile)!  How big and small it all is.  I can't take my eyes off of a little baby that I love.  I literally stare at him, absolutely mesmerized.  Amazed!  Delighted with the expressions that dance through his eyes, his little hands and how they curl tightly around my finger.  I fed him with a spoon today and cooed at how quickly sweet potatoes covered his lower face and dripped off his nose.  He opened his mouth and tightened his muscles, nearly explosive with the excitement of the next bite.  I couldn't soak in enough of that moment.  It was pure love.          

I only hurt tonight because I love him and I'm sad that he is not mine.  Not in any real, tangible, official sense.  I'm not his mom, or his caretaker, or his relative in any way.  I'm a witness, though; I testify of how sweet he is, and how alive and fun and smart.   

What is for sure is that Dean changed me.  In some sense, he made me a mother.  Maybe no one will know that - maybe not even him - but he showed me the maternal love that is awakened by loving a child. 

A woman at church once assured me her body knew just what to do to become pregnant.  She spoke confidently, as if she were an executive who oversaw a factory of well-oiled machines churning away in her reproductive organs.  My experience trying to get pregnant was nothing like that.  No amount of medication or ovarian stimulation worked.  There were never any false alarms or double pink lines.

I did have the experience of lying on plenty of cold exam tables, my feet in stirrups.  Black, sleepy masses of follicles dozed away on ultrasound machines as the doctors explained to my husband that polycystic ovarian syndrome was the culprit.

During one appointment, the doctor pulled open my hospital gown so my stomach peeked through.  “See, the hair here,” he said, pointing around my belly button.  “It’s not beautiful and smooth like other women.”  Immediately I was filled with hot shame.  He finished with a punch: “Her breasts aren’t fully developed either.”

I have often squeezed my eyes since that moment and grasped for evidence that I was even a woman at all: my stomach sprouted unwanted hair and my breasts were pint-sized. There was my uterus, but I had to balance that with my underperforming ovaries. Not beautiful like other women.  Those were the expert’s words I reached for when weighing the scales.

After two and a half years without any signs of pregnancy in sight, my husband and I timidly began talking about adoption.

When I broached this topic with a friend one afternoon, she encouraged me to “not give up” on my body, as if adoption was only something one accepts as a consolation prize.  Other women encouraged me to keep trying too.  My body was seen as infallible if I 1) just relaxed, 2) gave it more time, or 3) stuck my legs in the air after sex (my mother-in-law offered up this tip).

I wanted to provide a child for my husband through adoption, but other women wanted my body to produce one.

Dissonance is what I experienced next.  I called an IVF clinic in the late afternoon and woke up sobbing the next morning.  I did not want to walk the road of advanced infertility treatment but I felt so much pressure to persevere on the journey towards biological motherhood.  To become beautiful, like other women.

We visited with a specialist in Chicago.  I showed him nine months of charts I had meticulously kept of my menstrual cycles.  Pushing them back across the desk, he actually called the charts worthless.  Though shocked, I responded, “They might not be medically useful to you, but they help me feel informed.”

It was my body, after all.  Did everyone have to have an opinion about it? That question has been asked by more women than just myself.  Our bodies have landed squarely in the forum of public debate.  My experience with infertility was a personal ride through age-old questions: Does my body have to measure up to other women’s?  Do I have the right to learn about how it works?  Will my womanhood always stubbornly be attached to reproduction?  Mostly I wanted to know: When could I start paving a path towards motherhood outside of my body?

It turns out the moment I answered that last question was the very moment I made up my mind.

We did not return to either doctor, and I stopped consulting my friends about our family planning decisions.  We chose adoption.  My body has never felt more functional than when I own it, celebrate it, and think about all the love it can impart.