March 29, 2010
Changing emotions
So our plans to do all the IF treatments and then adopt? Remember them? Yeah, me too. Except now I’m not sure that’s the right path. I go back and forth on it. I desperately want to give birth again…but I’m not sure that it’s desperate enough to spend that kind of money on it. That’s a LOT of money and while we’re both now employed, we’re still coming back from having only one income (the smaller one) for a year. And yet, we can save up the money. We can do it. I’m just not sure I want to spend it on a chance once we have it. I’m coming back around to the same view as last time when we were at this crossroads. If we only had the money to do one, would I want to do IVF or would I want to adopt?
This time it’s a little different. If we do IVF and it doesn’t work, we can still adopt fairly soon afterwards. It will take a little while to save up enough to start but it’s not going to be several years of saving like it would have been last time. When we decided to adopt K, we were looking at an either/or situation, and we didn’t want to take that risk.
I just keep thinking about the money that goes into it! If IVF works and we get a real take-home baby out of it, it will have been worth every single penny that we spent on it. If it doesn’t work, will I feel really stupid for having spent close to $20,000 (between the Clomid/IUI cycle first and then IVF) to go through it? And I’m not sure of the answer. Part of me feels like it would bring a lot of peace-of-mind to know that we really did give it our best shot and that I won’t regret not having done it. In that case, it seems worth it. The rest of me thinks about what we could do with an extra $20,000 after bringing home our next children and wow, there is so much! I don’t know which part is bigger.
There have been several days in the last two weeks when I’ve felt like telling J “Forget the whole IVF idea. Let’s call Sarah (our social worker, not her real name) and start a homestudy.” I’ve held off because I know he’d go along with it. He is truly completely fine with taking either road and so I know that if I say that, he’ll be all for moving ahead with that plan. And I’m really not sure whether I want to say goodbye to the possibility of another child by birth forever. I definitely know that I have at least one more child by adoption waiting for me, even if he/she isn’t born yet. I feel that very, very strongly and I know that’s in our future. But I think I feel it almost as strongly that I need to give IVF a shot.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just impatience to get started that’s driving these emotions. We could start a homestudy and move forward with adoption today if we wanted. We have a lot of the paperwork already collected from last time and we could gather much of the rest pretty quickly now that we have a good SW. (We used Sarah for our post-placement reports on the advice of a friend and she is fan-freaking-tastic.) We could be signed up and dossier-ready in two or three months, I would imagine. With the timeframes at the agency we plan to use (WA.CAP), we would probably get a sibling referral around the beginning of next year, and could probably have our children home by next summer. Contrast that with IVF. We can’t start for another couple of months, probably June or so and then do IVF in August/September. If it works and we get a child out of it, fantastic. We’d be bringing home our baby around the same time. If it doesn’t work, we’re 6 months down the road to starting another adoption, which means we’d get caught in next summer’s court closures and probably not bring home our children until the beginning of 2012. That’s forever away.
I wish we could do it backwards. I wish we could adopt now and try IVF in a couple of years, but I know J won’t go for that. If we don’t give birth, we’ll adopt siblings and end up with 4 children. If we do give birth, we’ll adopt one child (probably 4-6 years old) in a couple of years and end up with 4 children. J won’t go for adopting siblings now and trying IVF in the future, ending up with 5 children. I could be persuaded to do it pretty easily. But neither of us really wants to adopt one now and then adopt again in a couple of years, both for financial and emotional reasons. (A part of me kind of hopes that if we do IVF now, I can still persuade J to adopt siblings in a couple of years; if not, I’d be OK with one at that time.) The idea of 5 kids doesn’t scare me unreasonably since we’ve been set on 4 for so long. Perhaps there’s something wrong with me 😉
The other part is that if we did it backwards and brought home kids next year, we would want to wait another 2 years after that before doing IVF so that our kids have plenty of time to be the “newest”, so that our family dynamic could adjust to having 4 kids before we consider adding a 5th. We just feel strongly that’s important for our family. That would put me at 35 before doing IVF, that dreaded “advanced maternal age” designation, and a full 10 years after my pregnancy with P. I never considered two pregnancies 10 years apart. Pregnancy was tough on me at 25. I suspect it would be quite a bit harder now at 32, and still harder yet at 35. And that’s assuming there are no complications! Plus, I don’t know how I’d feel about knowing that if it didn’t work, that was truly it. No more IVF, no more adoption, just accept that as the end. If we do IVF now and it doesn’t work…well, we’re planning adopt anyway and it doesn’t feel as final. If we did it then, it would be the complete end of the line.
I genuinely can’t talk to J about this. He is so completely willing to go along with either one that I can’t get an opinion from him on the best choice for our family. He would like to have another child by birth, he would enjoy it. But he’s also really fine if he doesn’t. He’s fine with spending the money for IVF if I think it’s important to try, but he’d be fine choosing not to do it. He’s fine with IVF now and one adoption later or adopting siblings now. ARGH!
Thoughts? I need some new ways to chew through the processes.
PCOS Baby 