Coming off of a weekend in which I repeatedly tried to play with my 6 year old. And feeling a little bit like a failure because I can't be a true playmate. Because I'm not a little kid and I can't quite inhabit that world.
And so my thoughts turn to having another child. A sibling for Zach. A partner in crime.
And again I will fail. Of course I will. How on earth could I not fail? The ovaries are now legitimately old. It's now totally normal to be infertile. I'm 40. I've been diagnosed as infertile for 9 years.
It's not the kind of condition that gets better with time.
Family-building
People don't use that word unless you are having a hard time getting pregnant.
Once you are infertile this word sequence makes a lot more sense. And yet, being able to "fix" the problem is a question of privilege. And the question of privilege is what stops me from adopting. It's a tangly twisty world of privilege--the domestic adoption world. Women without privilege relinquish in adoption, women with privilege adopt. Or, at least, that is my perception and my fear. I think I would be paralyzed by the weight of this reality if I were to try to adopt. I think I would have an incredibly hard time with it. This isn't me saying that adoption is wrong, it's just me acknowledging that adopting would keep me up at night. And not in the good, healthy, I-have-a-newborn way. And even foster-adoption is fraught with the issue of privilege. I see that women who come from privilege rarely have their children taken away from them. Or, if they do, those children go to family members, not strangers. Again, privilege rears its curious head.
And so, to avoid the stickiness of questions of privilege, I find myself choosing IVF with donor eggs. Which, again---privilege. I get to make that choice, because my financial situation is favorable. And someone is deciding, for some reason, to "donate" eggs...for a fee. That's pretty damn sticky right there.
So what the hell am I doing? And what am I doing in this handbasket?
Yours gluefully,
PBfish
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