Acceptance... Maybe

I'm going through a bit of a phase right now. Looking over all the stuff I have accumulated (yes, I, Michael isn't much of a packrat), I am ready to get rid of about half the stuff we own. I really think I could do it. I feel like the house is bursting at the seams. Collections of things I thought I would like to start and never finished are hanging around, as are things people gave me as part of existing collections that aren't to my taste.

One of the main areas that has been bugging me lately is the cabinet under my sink in the bathroom. I can never find anything. The other day I needed a bandaid and rather than search through the rubble, I just went to the store and bought a box. So last night, I just opened the cabinet up, pulled over the trash can and started emptying.

It was easy at first, an empty glass jar, expired medicines, dried up nail polish, bits of paper. But then, in the very back, I came upon two boxes and I froze. A home pregnancy kit and an ovulation kit. I had started a handwritten diary when we were given the all clear from the doctor to go ahead and try, and I've long since lost that (thankfully), but those pink boxes were staring me in the face. They are the last concrete pieces of a dream that was not meant to be, and I was holding them in my hand, preparing to throw them away.

I was at a social gathering this week with a friend who has been struggling to conceive for a while and to whom I had given some adoption advice. She recently found out that her health insurance will cover several procedures that might allow them to conceive a child, so they are putting adoption on the back burner while they pursue those avenues. My sister was with me, and my friend asked her if she had been planning on Baby #2 so soon and my sister honestly replied, "No, not at all, we didn't want any more." My friend turned to me and said, "Don't you hate people like that?"

Yes.

I can't lie. It's true. It's not that I hate people like that, I hate that it's so easy for some people, and for me it was impossible. I hate listening to women complain about their pregnancies. It still hurts every time someone tells me they're expecting or planning to get pregnant again knowing it will be just that easy to do the deed a time or two and bang! Nine months later, a baby. (And I know full well that for some of my friends it is not that easy at all, so no hate mail please!) I hate all that Michael and I went through the true extent of which I don't think anyone will ever know, and that at the end of the day, I am sitting on the bathroom floor holding the last test strips I didn't use, crying my eyes out.

Our adoption journey has been nothing short of miraculous. I would not trade my daughter for any child on the face of this Earth. I love her with a fierceness that terrifies me. But if I'm totally honest, a part of me will always wonder what a biological child of mine would have looked like. (And not what some computer generated model of a child of mine would have looked like, but thanks for playing!) I wonder what my experience of carrying a child would have been like. Would I have loved it or hated it? What would childbirth have been like? Would I have tried hypnobirthing, hydrobirthing, or straight drugs?

I threw the tests in the trash and dried my eyes. Today I will drive them to the dump. I know I will feel like a weight has been lifted once they're gone, which is funny because I didn't even know they were there. I'm ready to move on. I think.