(I guess I need to start off by say­ing, no … things have def­i­nitely not changed in my bar­ren world. And don’t let the title of this post fool you. Appar­ently I may have “freaked” a cou­ple peo­ple out by both the title and the pic­ture below … LOL!)

I’m not a bet­ting per­son. Which, when you think of the many trips Hubby & I have taken to Vegas, is quite humor­ous. All those casi­nos, and the most we played were slots.

I mean, I’ve played poker and black­jack in my col­lege years; but seri­ously, all bets were based on pen­nies. Or cig­a­rettes, depend­ing on who you were play­ing with (<cough> Tim <cough>). But to place actual money that’s more than a dol­lar (okay, maybe $2 max for a slot machine)? Can’t see myself spend­ing that kind of money.

My odds with these tests were never good

Which, given the odds that Hubby & I were given when we did our one cycle of IVF, makes it ironic. We were given a 51% chance that we’d be suc­cess­ful in our pur­suit to become preg­nant. We knew the odds were only 1% more on our favor. We had hoped to win this bet — a bet in which we put a boat­load of money into the pot — and we lost. And I was devastated.

That’s not to say that I regret ever hav­ing done our one cycle of IVF. Because even back then I knew that this was some­thing Hubby & I had to try in order to feel as if we tried every­thing in our quest to repro­duce. I’m just sim­ply say­ing that the results of that bet, that one IVF cycle, was enough for me to know that I could never place another bet on another IVF cycle ever again.

So yes … the next log­i­cal step would be to go for adop­tion, right?

Except adop­tion isn’t a sim­ple thing to just “think about.” First, there’s the process of griev­ing the fact that I can’t have a baby. That alone is noth­ing sim­ple. That process involves never being able to expe­ri­ence preg­nancy. In my case, it involved never being able to see two pink lines in a preg­nancy test.  And it involves feel­ing as if my body’s failed, not only me and my Hubby (espe­cially my hus­band), but our par­ents and our sib­lings. And our sib­lings chil­dren, too.

Then there’s the other part that I needed to grieve; which is out­lined in more detail in this recent post. It’s griev­ing the fact that we will never be able to have our own bio­log­i­cal baby.  A child that we could pass our genes to. A child to pass the Fil­ipino tra­di­tions we were taught grow­ing up; and find­ing a way to blend both our Amer­i­can and Fil­ipino sides together. A child to carry on my Hubby’s last name.

And while I’ve pretty much begun to resolve those grief issues, there’s still that lack of strength that I feel I need in order to go through the entire adop­tion process.  Because it takes some­one who really has enough strength to climb over the prover­bial brick wall get­ting in the way of hav­ing a child. And specif­i­cally, I’m talk­ing about all the rules and reg­u­la­tions and inves­ti­ga­tions into your pri­vate lives just to raise a child that is not bio­log­i­cally your own. Quite frankly, I know that I don’t have what it takes to go through that.

(Part Two con­tin­ues tomor­row … )

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Related Links:

Thoughts on Adoption

Baby Pic­ture