Archive for the ‘Decisions’ Category

I don’t think that there’s ever a good time or a good way to tell your parents that you’re pregnant, but I have to tell you before you read any further – the way I handled it was probably the worst way to go about it. It’s not any easier when you are in your 20’s than I imagine it would be when you are in your teens. The only comforting thought was that I could retreat to my own apartment when it was over instead of us all being in the same house, having to face each other over and over again every day.

It was a 20 minute drive from my apartment to my parents’ house and the whole way there I ran through different scenarios. I tried to picture what I would say and how they would react. The reactions I imagined ranged from tears to outrage. My heart was fluttering wildly and that “morning sickness” (that for me was all day sickness) seemed closer to the surface that usual. I blame my nervousness entirely on what happened next.

As soon as my Mom let me in the house, I followed her to the living room, plopped down on the sofa and in one breath I made my announcement, “I am pregnant, I’m placing my baby for adoption and while I don’t need your financial support, I would appreciate your emotional support.”

I cringed at the awkward way I had made my announcement and I was further upset when I saw the dazed expressions on their faces. I had done this all wrong, I knew it. I was griping the backpack with the profiles in it like I was ready to run screaming from the house at any moment. It was my Dad who recovered first, he blinked his green eyes rapidly and began asking questions.

“Have you seen a doctor yet?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted, and smiled despite myself. My Dad was a hospital administrator, health care was, of course, his first concern.

“Are you taking prenatal vitamins?”

“I drink a glass of orange juice and a glass of milk every day,” I responded.

My Dad gave me a stern look, and I almost laughed despite myself. This is the response I should’ve expected, this was pretty typical of my Dad. This is where the deeply logical part of me comes from.

“We could adopt the baby and raise it,” my Mom said in a quite voice, and despite the fact that my parents raising my child was the last thing I wanted, my heart swelled and I loved her so much for being willing to do that.

“Jane, we would be in our 70’s when this baby graduates high school,” My Dad said very gently.

My Mom frowned and her hazel eyes welled up with tears as she looked at me. “I’m just worried that no one else will know how to raise your baby, just as I haven’t always known how to raise you.” She said.

Tears sprung to my eyes. My Mom and I have always been very different, I tended to take more after my Dad, but I never dreamed that she attributed those differences to some fault with her or how she was raising me. It was like the Earth shifted under my feet as I looked at my Mom with new eyes. I wondered how many bratty teenage fits she blamed herself for, thinking it was some short coming on her part, and it broke my heart.

“Mom,” I choked out between sobs, “you’ve been the best Mom I could ask for.” I said as I hugged her and together we cried. We cried for things that had apparently gone unspoken between us for too long, for the baby that we would welcome into the world and then have to say goodbye to. We cried for each other, both of us imagining the heartbreak that laid ahead, not for ourselves but for the other one. Even my Dad’s eyes welled with tears. When we were all cried out, we discussed things calmly and rationally.

My Dad was adamant that I needed to call and make a Doctor’s appointment first thing on Monday, and I promised I would. When I told them about the meeting with Mary from the Attorney’s office, my Mom said she would be there to offer her guidance and support. These were the easy things to sort out, more complicated was who else would we tell?

On both sides of my family I had cousins who were currently involved in the adoption process, trying to adopt, so we decided not to tell our family, beyond our family immediate circle. I wasn’t comfortable having my baby go somewhere so close to home, where I would be involved in the baby’s life but expected not to be overly involved. I didn’t want them to feel rejected that I wasn’t considering them but I didn’t want to be pressured by them either, keeping the pregnancy quiet was probably safer.

I carefully fanned out the profiles and let my parents review them. I didn’t say a word, as I didn’t want my feelings or thoughts to shade theirs. After reading all of them my Mom looked up at me very seriously.

“You are 100% sure, that you want to place this child for adoption,” she asked and after I nodded at her she continued, “because I can’t imagine any greater heartbreak than to tell someone you’re giving them a child and then to take that away from them.”

“I’m sure Mom, I want something more for my baby then what I can give it right now.” I said and she sensed the sincerity in what I was saying.

My Mom and I put our heads together to go over the profiles again. My Dad restlessly excused himself, he said he was going to get the names of some doctors. I sensed what he couldn’t say, that putting this baby up for adoption was going to be harder on him than he was was going to be able to say.

My Mom narrowed the profiles down to three, my top two were in her three. I explained my concerns about the cat allergy to her and so we eliminated one of her three. Like me, once we were down to the same two she felt a pull towards one couple over the other. There are really no words to say why, but I felt more confident in my decision with my Mom and I on the same page.

When I left, I had the other profiles in my bag but I kept out Beth and John to look at over and over again, they were the parents I told myself as I flipped through the profile, MY adoptive parents. I looked at the house and I imagined my baby (sometimes a little boy, sometimes a little girl) sitting at the table and playing in the living room.

I’ve always been something of an early bird, my eyes popping open shortly after the sun comes up, even on Saturday. Pregnancy didn’t change that, but now I found myself nodding off on a lazy day, hanging around the house. I was having a lovely lazy Saturday when I decided to wander out to the mailbox and that changed everything.

In my mailbox was a package from the Attorney’s office and inside were five profiles of prospective parents for my baby. I practically ran back to my apartment where I could lay them out and look at them in peace. My heart was racing and my palms were sweating, I was so nervous!

I sat down cross legged on the floor and took a deep breath before I pulled them out of the box to look at them. I was trying to think logically, what was I looking for? How would I know my baby’s parents when I saw them? I was going back and forth between trying to apply logic and telling myself I was going to have to trust my gut, two very different instincts at war within me.

I had five profiles with five happy couples smiling up at me. I picked up each one and with tears rolling down my face as I read the stories they held and looked at the pictures. In some ways they were the same, there were letters of introduction and most of them had shared their adoption journeys with me. Those journeys were full of longing, heartache, and medical procedures that sounded expensive and painful. Some of the profiles had endorsements from friends and family and some of them held promises that I would never be forgotten from my baby’s life, or from theirs. By the time I finished the last profile I was bawling.

I took a deep breath and stepped away from the semicircle of profiles that I had made. I went in the kitchen and rifled through the fridge looking for nothing in particular and settling on a glass of milk.

Were my baby’s parents in that stack? Would I know them if I saw them? Was one of those couples anymore deserving than the others? Questions were swimming in my head, questions that no one could answer for me. Rob was the only person who knew my secret and he was out of town visiting Emily.

I could do this, I had to do this, I thought as I sat down back in the middle of the semicircle of profiles.

I applied the lens of logic first as I picked up each profile and looked at it again. Two of the five profiles showed cats, Rob and I were both very allergic to cats. (I had actually almost been hospitalized over my cat allergy before.) I took the cat owners and put them in a separate pile. I was 100% positive that those parents would give up their cats for a baby, but I also knew that cat dander was hard to get rid of and I didn’t want my baby to start his new life wheezing and his parents saying goodbye to furry babies.

Trying to maintain my logical view there was a third couple that I ruled out because their profile talked alot about “love at first sight” and how they had only recently become a couple. They were confident that their love was strengthened by their struggles with infertility but I had just been burned by my own love at first sight experience. I wanted a more stable couple, one that was more established. I put them in the pile with the couples who had cats.

This last decision felt a little less logical and a little more from my gut, and it made me a little uneasy. Was I judging these people? It seemed wrong, but I was trying to chose the best parents possible for my baby. I knew that any couple could fall out of love and end up getting divorced, but I just didn’t like the odds for a newer couple. I comforted myself that something in that profile would resonate with another birthmother, it wasn’t like a game show where if I didn’t pick them they would never get picked.

I was left with two profiles and from a logical standpoint they looked similar and I knew it was time to fully go with my gut. I picked them up and read them, evaluated them over and over again. I read the profiles so many times that I still remember the names of that second couple, the couple that would not become the adoptive parents for my baby. Of the two profiles there was one that spoke to me more than the other, there was something comforting in their letters, something welcoming in the pictures of their home.

Even though I found myself leaning more towards that one couple over the other, I was overwhelmed again by the decision that I had to make. This was forever, could I really make this decision by myself?

I picked up the five profiles and put them in a back pack, and I called my parents to ask if they had some time for me to stop by, they said they did. With shaky hands I grabbed my car keys and headed to my parents house, to tell them news that I suspected would change our relationship forever.

“What does this one say?” Rob asked, standing in the master bathroom near the sink with his back to me.

“It’s positive, like the last two, so can we put an end to the farce – clearly I’m pregnant.” I said as I handed him the third pregnancy test I had taken for him in the last half hour, making my way to go sit down on the bed.

In the bedroom I contemplated the bed, the bed that had been our bed and I decided to make my way to the living room instead. I sat down on the sofa and found that I couldn’t get comfortable, every fiber of my being reminded me that this wasn’t my home anymore, I didn’t want to be there. He had followed me into the living room and sat down in his recliner but was eyeing me warily. The was silence between us, not the companionable silence that comes with intimacy a new uneasy silence.

I could feel tears threatening to fill my eyes. This had been my home, and he had been my love, were we really reduced to this? He distrusted me so much that I had been asked to take not one, but THREE pregnancy tests. We could hardly hold a civilized discussion.

I had called Rob no less than a dozen times before he finally answered, realizing I was not going to stop calling until I got to talk to him. I explained the situation calmly and concisely – I was pregnant and I planned on placing the baby for adoption, I was only calling him because he had to sign paperwork as well. (Frankly, I didn’t really want to have this conversation over the phone but my concern was that I would never get him face to face with a cryptic “we need to talk” message.)

“Emily is going to be very unhappy about this,” he said putting an end to the akward silence.

It was the wrong thing to say, like striking a match to kindling, my sadness flared into anger with that one statement.

“Your new girlfriend’s happiness is really the least of my concerns right now,” I said as I rose to my feet and started for the door.

“Hey wait,” he said as he jumped to his feet and gently grabbed my arm, “I’m sorry it was the first thing that came to my mind.”

“How lucky for me that when I tell you I’m pregnant, her happiness is the first thing that comes to your mind,” I said bitterly, this was not going the way I had planned.

“Look, sit back down, let’s talk about this,” he said.

I sat back down, even less comfortably, on the edge of the sofa. I was ready to bolt for the door in case things took a turn for the worst.

“You know that I won’t be paying you any child support, right?” He blurted out.

The only good thing about Rob’s statement is that I was so shocked, I couldn’t make a break for it. He knocked the wind out of me.

“What?” I asked

“I won’t be paying you any child support if you change your mind and decide to keep the baby.”

I thought I was angry before, when he brought up Emily, but now I was irate.

“First and foremost, IF I decided to keep the baby, you are legally obligated to help support YOUR child, no matter what your intentions are,”

“I will leave the country before I pay you a dime in child support,” he interrupted me.

My eyes narrowed but I continued on as though I had not been interrupted “and secondly, conversations like this are exactly why I think it would be better if we placed the baby for adoption. We can’t hold a civilized conversation, let alone co-parent a child.”

I was on my feet and out the door before he could respond. I made it as far as the front porch when a wave of nausea crashed over me and I bent over and threw up in the bushes and that was where he found me.

Sitting on the front porch in the afternoon sun, after I had thrown up on the zinnas, we had a much calmer discussion. Maybe he had realized I wasn’t the enemy, this wasn’t a ploy to trap him, I had an adoption plan and really and truly if I could’ve not involved him, I wouldn’t have. Maybe seeing me in a weakened state brought out some of the tender feelings that he still had for me, somewhere underneath all the drama. Perhaps it was just that the porch was a safer, more neutral location, but calmly and civilly we discussed “our” adoption plan. (I was a little disgruntled that he was suddenly acting like he had been responsible in making the adoption plan, but as long as it got his signature on the dotted line I wasn’t going to split hairs.)

I calmly and rationally explained my search for an adoption attorney, what Mary had said when she talked to me, and where things would go from here.

“So what do you need from me?” he asked in a tentative voice, and I felt more relaxed.

We discussed and debated and in the end we agreed to three things -

First and foremost, he was not going to discuss the pregnancy at work. We lived in a small town, at the heart of which is a miltary base where Rob worked. Someday, his job would take him out of this town and I didn’t forever want to be known as the girl he got pregnant. I had already learned that gossip spread like wildfire across the base.

Second, Rob did not want to tell his parents. They lived out of State and were all ready out of sorts with him, because earlier this year he had relinquished parental rights to his daughter from his first marriage. His daughter was not quite six months when he and his wife had divorced and now that his ex-wife was getting married and the little girl was two, he felt like it was the right thing to do. (I had noticed that after he relinquished his rights his relationship with his ex-wife improved and even the way he felt about his daughter seemed to change for the better.) He didn’t think that they could survive losing another grandchild. I had only met his Father and liked him alot, but since they were no longer part of my family, I agreed to whatever was best for Rob.

Finally, Rob said he was going to cancel Emily’s two week visit. I did not ask him to this concession, but I was relieved when he made the offer. He was adamant that I was going to need a strong support network to get me through my pregnancy and he wanted to make himself available to me at any time of the day or night. He told me stories about the day his ex-wife woke up and couldn’t stand raw chicken and he had been forced to remove all of it from the house while she was sick in the bathroom.

For all the hurt and ugliness that this meeting started with, it ended on a note that I felt was hopeful. Rob and I were united in one thing – we wanted what was best for the baby. I was certain as long as we could keep our focus on the baby everything else would just fall into place.

I am pregnant. I keep saying it to myself trying to get used to the thought because really there are long stretches where I seem to forget! There’s plenty of things going on to distract me – work, dinner with friends, the impending holidays with my family. I go through all of it and pregnancy seems far away, but then a wave of nausea crashes down on me and reminds me, I am pregnant.

The day after my day of reflection, I went about the business of trying to determine how one places a child for adoption. I was not going to call any number on a bulletin board that said something like “Pregnant? Scared? Alone? call 800….” – I was never very clear what organization would be waiting for me on the other end of that line and I didn’t want to risk encountering anyone with negative opinions on how I got in my “delicate state.” (Okay, I’ll just say it – I didn’t want to be judged too harshly for getting pregnant, I know there are people who feel strongly about premarital sex and I wasn’t interested in revisiting the past – I was planning for my baby’s future.) I did the only other thing I could think of – I Googled “Adoption Attorney.”

Just as I had preconceived notions about the 800 numbers on the billboards, I had decided that I didn’t know if there was a Catholic Charities but it seemed like I had read negative things about them in the press, so I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to call any of the numbers on the ads in any magazines either. I wanted to talk to someone who was in the adoption business, someone who knew all the ins and outs so that’s why I decided to try to find an Adoption Attorney.

There wasn’t an Adoption Attorney in my small town, the closest one was three hours away, the next closest was almost six hours away, but I called and left messages with both offices.

The first office to call back was actually the office that was furthest away! The Social Worker asked questions, questions that got more and more intrusive. The questions started with things I expected like – “how far along was I” and they ventured into questions I didn’t expect, questions about my race and the race of the father and how certain I was who the father was. I started to feel a little defensive. When the social worker realized that Rob and I were both Caucasian, college educated – she seemed excited. She wanted to make an appointment to come meet with me in person as soon as possible. I made the appointment for next week, but I felt uneasy.

A little while later, the Social Worker from the second office called me. She asked some of the same questions, but there was something in her mannerism that made me feel more at ease. She did ask questions about my race (and Rob’s) but she didn’t drill me about being sure who the father was. There was something in her gentle probing questions that made me feel like she wanted not just what was best for the baby, but what was best for me too. I liked this woman, I felt like we clicked.

I talked to Mary, the social worker from the second office, for almost half an hour and she answered some of the questions that I had. I found out that I was going to have to tell Rob about the pregnancy, he had to sign papers too* or else he could later come and take the baby away from the adoptive parents claiming some sort of parental rights. (That certainly wasn’t what I wanted.) She explained that I would be provided with a counselor that I would meet with a few times over the course of my pregnancy. She was also very clear that while her office worked for the adoptive parents, they would make sure that I could have my own legal representation if I wanted it or felt uncomfortable with any of the arrangements being made.

Mary and I also talked about what the adoptive parents could help me with. I didn’t have health insurance so they would cover my medical expenses. However, there was also living expenses that could be covered depending on my need. Mary advised that I make a list of my monthly expenses that we would go over later.

We decided that she would send over some adoptive parent profiles for me to review and perhaps select parents for my child from. (Though she was very reassuring that there were more she could send if I didn’t feel like my adoptive parents were in there.) However, she was going to call and check in with me next week and give me some time to talk to Rob.

I called the first office and canceled my appointment next week, stating that I had decided to work with someone closer, in case I needed support. I never told them that they had left me with a slimy “selling my baby to the highest bidder” feeling, maybe I should have.

Then I called and left a message a for Rob and told him that we needed to talk and to please call me back.

*laws about the birthfathers vary from state to state, but I know that in my home state these laws have already changed.

I took off work today, and I curled up on the sofa in front of the TV. I can’t say that I’m really watching it but it’s on and there’s a wide variety of old sitcoms dancing across it. I must confess that though I called in sick, I’m not sick – I’m pregnant.

As I mentioned, my body had been a little off lately. I contributed it to relationship woes, being uprooted, etc. but suddenly I found myself with a “green around the gills” feeling and there was no denying it – something in my body was changing. The pregnancy test I took that morning turned positive almost immediately and it was currently sitting next to the sink, it was almost like a magic wand that I used to dispel my disbelief. I’d walk in and pick it up and look at it again – there was no doubt, I was pregnant.

I wasted first part of the morning contemplating the “how” of this situation. Don’t get me wrong I understand the basics, but didn’t we always use condoms? I tried to replay the last few weeks that Rob and I lived together until ultimately I realized that I was just looking backwards to avoid trying to figure out what to do about the future. If we had forgotten to use one once, or if there had been some mishap, was irrelevant – I was pregnant.

In the interest of full disclosure I will admit that I considered ALL of the options available to me, as I stayed close to the house, weighing all of them careful.

I considered terminating the pregnancy. It was the easiest option for me to rule out, but I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I thought about it. I didn’t think it would be the easiest option to live with afterward, but it would be something that I would have to live with alone – I wouldn’t have to deal with disappointing my family, telling my coworkers. At the end of contemplating – I realized that all of my reasons that made terminating my pregnancy seem attractive were all rather selfish, and considering that it was such a selfless act that brought me into this world it seemed like a poor way to repay my Birthmother’s selflessness.

The second option I discarded was keeping the baby. I was living in a one bedroom apartment, with very little furniture, trying very hard to make ends meet on my own. I didn’t think I could count on Rob for any help – financial or otherwise. I kept thinking about the hard questions that I knew would be inevitable – how come I don’t have a Dad? Where did I come from? I kept thinking about the talents the baby might have that I would be responsible for helping to cultivate – how would I be able to afford tee ball, piano lessons, or anything else “extra” that the baby might want? I thought about all the struggles that were ahead for the baby and me and I felt that I was entirely unequal to the task. I wanted more for the baby than this one bedroom apartment without a bed. (Of course I should point out that while one neat paragraph may make it look like a quick decision – it wasn’t.)

So I came to adoption, but do I really think I could place my baby for adoption?  I wonder how I would go about finding adoptive parents, I knew that I had family members that were currently trying to find babies to adopt but I didn’t think I could have my child be close and yet not know who I was. (Not to mention what happens when they find out that “cousin Joy” is really their birthmother?) No, keeping the baby in my family seems like a bad idea.

I started making lists of the things that I needed to pull together to proceed. I want to find an adoption attorney,  I need to Google adoption and see what information is out there, I have to figure out what I was going to tell my family (and when), and of course there is the sticky situation with Rob. (I’d rather just drop off the planet and never talk to him again, too imature? I don’t know.)

I have a starting point, I am pregnant and placing my child for adoption, and a rough idea of where to go from here. I have to admit that I’m a little scared, but I have to do what’s right for me, and what’s right for the baby growing inside me, and making me feel mildly nauseous, even as I write this.