Why not adoption?

When a couple has been pronounced infertile, the next logical thought is adoption.  It seems like the easiest answer to make a family. And yes, it does make sense in a lot of cases. The cost for adoption however, is staggering.  We learned this after calling several agencies in the early days of our struggle. We learned that an adoption would run $20,000 to $40,000 depending on whether the baby would be domestic or international. Being poor, young newlyweds, it might as well have been a million dollars.

And I longed to experience a baby's secret movements beneath my heart. My grief over not being able to conceive a child was crushing. Would I be okay if we never had a baby? Yes, I would, we would. We would have found comfort in each other and moved on. We would have learned a new skill, traveled, enjoyed our nieces and nephew and found  happiness along our path. Yet, I wasn't able to give the dream up until we had pursued all of our options. Donor IUI was one of those options.

IUI, we learned, is relatively inexpensive. After insurance, our out of pocket expense was about $800 for a single attempt.  Knowing the cost of adoption and IVF ($18,000) we felt like we'd found a pot of gold.  Our daughter was conceived after nine attempts and was born in 2007.

Fast forward to Summer 2011.  We tried the adoption route and it didn't work out for us. We had a three month old little girl within our reach and a crib waiting for her at home but she was not meant to be ours. The adoption fell through a few days before we were supposed to bring her home. I hope that wherever she is now, she is cared for and loved like she deserves to be.  We will always love her and wonder about what could have been. It is still difficult to talk about.

We had to decide if we were willing to try again. And painfully, we weren't. While adoption is a perfect solution for many families, it isn't for ours. This was a decision that kept me staring into the darkness when I should have been sleeping. For some time we decided to just enjoy our daughter and let our emotions settle. So we did just that and have enjoyed a few vacations as our little family of 3.