After my shopping therapy I got some time alone yesterday when everyone else went bowling, and today I spent the morning looking that the Exploring Adoption BB at www.inciid.org. It was really informative. With bi-racial adoption (what we would be looking to do) it will be cheaper and quicker to be a mom than if we wanted a white baby. Plus it appears that the private facilitators prefer working with the tight market of white babies, so the bi-racial adoptions are left to agencies, which I would feel more comfortable using. It also appears that congress is looking at a bill which would double the adoption tax credit. I don't know that we would be earning enough as a post doc and student to actually be paying enough taxes to get the full credit back, but it could mean that the year we adopted, we could conceivably get all our taxes back. This all made me feel much more positive. Even the "adoption fell through" posts didn't make me feel as sad as the "TTC 3+ years" posts usually do.

I have been pretty down ever since a friend e-mailed me that this is their last IF treatment month and then they are moving on to adoption. I was so jealous. They are going to be parents soon and I am still in limbo about everything and even should we decide to go the adoption route, it doesn't make sense to do it here, but rather to wait until we are back in the US. That is probably 18 months away from even starting the homestudy! That seemed so far away to me, and I felt so hopeless. But seeing all these posts about adoption and reading the posts on the adopted and pg BB on Pregnancy Today made me realize a very important lesson to be learned by my jealousy and sadness.

It is WAY more important to me to be a mom than to ever be pg. By the time I have done all the IF treatments and cried and everything I will have gone through a very important and painful "childbearing" experience. I don't care if I never feel a baby kick inside me, but I will die inside if I never hear a child call "mommy" for me in the night.

Actually, going through the adoption BB made me feel better too. For the first time in a while I really felt that I *would* be a mom someday. We might have to wait another year and half or longer, but I could wait a long time knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, I feel much better today than I have felt in ages. Maybe I'll use the adoption BB as therapy. LOL

It did make me cry though. Someone posted a story about a bunch of kids in a class drawing pictures of their families. One little boy drew himself with different colored hair than everyone else in his family. The kids started talking about this and talking about whether he had been adopted. One girl piped up that she knew all about being adopted, because she was adopted, and it meant that she was born in her mommy's heart instead of in her tummy.

I recognized the reference from one of the posts on the adopted and pg board, and it made me cry. I realized then that I don't care about babies in my tummy, I never really have, but I couldn't go on thinking that there might never be a baby in my heart. That is what gets me when I see babies on TV, not where they came from, but that they are in someone's heart and I don't know when that someone will be me. I feel much better now, though. More positive that it will happen for me. I am really glad too that I have always felt -- and Jon feels too -- that if once we are not talking about our genes specifically, we have no preference for what our children will look like. Once we get past the, "Oh, he has your mother's eyes" thing, we don't care at all about skin color, hair type, any of it. In fact we both find it a little exciting to think that we could end up with someone completely different to both of us. Jon, who is a basketball fiend and plays at every opportunity, is a little concerned about not passing on his basketball affinity. But as he is of Welsh descent and they are not renowned for their basketball prowess (no offence to the Welsh) I figure genes from any other background will do just as well.

I feel better and more relaxed about all this than I have in ages. It feels so good to really feel that I have my vision of my future back.