Torrefaction

We've hit a lull in the paperchase - waiting for fingerprint clearance to come back from the FBI so that the Home Study can be completed.  Just about every other piece of paper is done (the I-171h won't come til long after the home study is done, so I'm not even fretting about that yet.).  Now I have nothing to do, adoption-wise.   So that leaves me plenty of time to feel bad about being infertile.

I spent my 20's trying to get my shit together.  It really wasn't together at all.  I made a huge radical life change when I was 25, after the sudden death of a close friend.  I dropped out of graduate school (Lit and Creative Writing) and moved to the big city and started working with computers.  I had a few friends here but mostly not, and I'd never lived anywhere really big.  It was the right choice - it started me on the path to being actually happy for the first time in my life - but it was a very hard couple of years.  I didn't do anything too masively stupid but I did manage to fall mildly in love and get my heart broken.  I was 28 when I met Hub and was still licking my wounds and kind of drifting, life-wise.

It took a while to get around to getting married - I wasn't cut out for partnership.  I'd always dated jerks, so I didn't really know how to deal with someone nice.  "You mean, when I come home, I'm supposed to sit and talk with you?  But what if I'm in a bad mood?"  Fortunately for me, Hub is a very patient, sweet guy, and he rode out the crappy first year of living together while I figured out how to be an ok girlfriend. 

So, I had more things to learn.  For assorted reasons, I didn't acquire certain skills as a youngster.  Managing stress, keeping my workaholism to a manageble level, friendly conflict resolution, building normal instead of super-rigid boundaries -- I had no idea how most people handled these things.  On the other hand, I am super-duper in a crisis, and will wrassle with a rabid tiger if I think there's a need.  A year or so of therapy made a big difference. (Advice to folks seeking therapy: find someone who specializes in your Issue.  If you're dealing with the death of a friend, for instance, see a grief counsellor. If you're addicted to crack*, see an addiction counsellor. Otherwise you get a sympathetic person who says "oh, wow, that's terrible" but doesn't teach you useful skills for changing)

By the time I was about 34 I felt like I was ready to be a mom.  I'd always wanted kids, but I didn't want to screw them up.  I knew I would never be perfect but I wanted to have skills for dealing with stress, and I wanted to get past the majority of what I'll call my moodiness.  Thanks to a good job, a terrific husband, a good therapist, a stable home life, and nobody I loved having died recently, I was feeling normal and healthy and ready to start trying for a baby.

Two years later, we thought probably something wasn't working right. My confidence in my ability to be a mom had grown a lot - we'd had a bunch of family crises & illnesses, including losing a very dear aunt to cancer at the age of 56.  It was horrible but it didn't send me into an anxiety spiral - it was just a sucky, grief-filled time, like anyone else would have.  So I felt like "if I can handle this, I can handle anything," but my body seemed to be going the other direction.  Another 2 years and I'm 38 and we had to decide how to address the situation.  If I was 30 right now, we'd be making a different set of plans.  We'd be adopting a baby, because we want to adopt a baby. But I'd also be going in for a laproscopy to see what they could do about my apparent endometriosis, and then I'd be finding out what they could do about the uterine abnormality.  In short, I'd have more options.  I could still daydream, at least, about growing a life inside me.

So, not only has my body failed me (and let Hub down), but my psyche has too.  If I was one of those people who sailed into her 20's truly knowing herself, not struggling with life angst or what have you, not wasting years in school and starting a career later than everybody else, not dating worthless bozos, etc etc, etc, then maybe I could be, you know, a REAL woman.

Sheesh, where's a giant stack of paperwork when you need it? 

*note: I am not addicted to crack. This is merely an example.  At the moment I am addicted to "chuckles" candy, but I'm sincerely working on beating it.