The First Trimester

Each trimester in pregnancy has its own challenges, but most women would probably agree that the first trimester is the hardest.  You often feel quite sick and exhausted. You're starting to gain weight, but not in a cute pregnant way, only so that you look fat.  You don't get the fun experience of feeling the baby move, and you may not have even shared the news, so no talking about it either.  With my second child I had migraines 2 or 3 times a week, that would last 1 or 2 days.  Do you know what medicine you can take for migraines when you are pregnant?  Tylenol and coffee.  Yeah, you may as well lick a lollipop!

With starting our home study, and now formally applying to our agency, we are officially in the first trimester of adoption-the paper chase.  It's called the paper chase because all you do is, well, chase paper!  This week alone Bard and I scheduled physicals and we have to take forms for our physicians to fill out regarding our health status.  I also scheduled an appointment our our cat because any animal under our roof must have proof of rabies (in doing so I discovered poor kitty was way behind on vaccines and will be receiving them all next week.  Oops!)  I contacted the girls' pediatrician so he could fill out a form-any child living with us must have healthy medical status on file.  We both applied for our marriage certificates, birth certificates, my divorce certificate, and the girls' birth certificates-these have to be certified copies, not just copied off what we already have in our possession.  We became a member of a credit union and started a loan process through them.  We received our passports (Bard's had to be renewed, so did Evelyn's, and Cici needed a new one) and made copies of them to send off to our home study agency-they already have mine.  We sent requests to Bard's past counselors for them to write a statement declaring his prognosis and ability to parent-we had sent one to mine last week.  We followed up on the five references required, all are in except one.  If you know us, feel free to guess who hasn't turned theirs' in yet . :) We filled out the formal application for our agency-we had already done the preliminary one-with several pages describing our health, jobs, emergency contacts, lists of all our medications (past and present), biological children, special needs, statements of faith, financial liabilities, assets, and net worth.  We started working on a 15 page form that details out what resources we have and what we will do if our child has special needs-questions like, "What are the signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome? Please list language/translation resources available in your area for the child you are about to adopt.  Please list local adoption support groups to assist in dealing with adoption issues and maintain your child's culture/heritage.  What if your child cannot learn in a regular classroom setting?  describe local resources for school age children with developmental and behavioral problems."  And that's just the beginning because next we are filling out our 20 page autobiographical that starts with listing all of your immediate family, where they live, occupation, marital status, date of birth, spouse's date of birth and then goes into fun questions like, "Describe your mother's role in the family currently and as a child.  Describe her personality. Describe your parents' marriage and how they display affection for each other. If your parents are divorced, describe why and describe any previous marriages."

Paper. Chase.

And that was just this past week!  It does not include tasks from the week before like writing out our childcare and emergency evacuation forms or finding all our residences from adulthood on or filling out background checks!  The first trimester of adoption is complete when the majority of this paperwork is turned into agencies and governments, along with your sanity.  I have to be honest though, I was pretty aware of what I was getting into.  Having watched many friends go through this process and now that I've read half a dozen blogs of people across the world going into this same scenario, my eyes were wide open.  The problem was that I made the mistake of thinking that I was going to add the intense, emotional, pressured experience of adoption to our regular lives.  What I did not know is that at the almost exact same moment we started pursuing adoption (at the end of last year) we also entered into one of the most stressful and exhausting periods of our marriage!  Some of the trauma has been what you would normally expect out of life-both of our grandparents had some scary health risks, and, it was the holidays so add stress, busyness, and events and then subtract money!  However, we have gone through some ridiculous work stress, which I won't go into because that was not even the main issue.  It's now February 5th.  We have not really been healthy since December 6th.  And of that two months, the majority of health problems were placed on our littlest, Cecilia, who at a whopping 22 pounds is just a pixie and should not be sick for so long.  She has been to the Dr nearly half a dozen times, been tested (twice) for Celiac, food allergies, had an abdominal x ray, been taken off dairy, put back on dairy, given two enemas (due for two more), and had the flu twice.  I could be counting wrong because I am going on a significant lack of sleep, but I believe she has had 4 days in the past two months that she did not vomit or have diarrhea. Night after night we moved her into a pac n play in our room so we could wake up with her right when she got sick.  She has lost weight, developed a whole new vocabulary (nurse, diarrhea, x-ray, soy milk), and spent more time on the couch watching Cinderella than I care to remember.  Poor baby :(  The good news is that we have hopefully gone through (most) of the worst.  We're still waiting on one test result, but it doesn't seem to be anything very serious, just a run (no pun intended!) of really bad luck.

Why?  Why all the additional stress right now? Regular life?  Maybe, but October and November didn't look like this!  I'm now so paranoid about vomiting (in the midst of all Cici's issues, Bard, myself, and Evelyn all came down with the stomach flu as well) that if one of the girls coughs, my heart stops until I'm sure they are just coughing and not starting to throw up.  The last time I got this little sleep for this long of time is when Cici was a newborn.  I had a minor breakdown/epiphany while driving the other day.  I was thinking about how our lives have been so stressful since we started the adoption process-not really because of the adoption process, but because of all the additional elements going wrong. And I thought that I knew it was going to be hard, but that the adoption part of it would be hard, not my regular life taking a tail spin into the surreal.  And all of the sudden I was mad.  Mad that we had been fighting for two months.  Mad that it had only been two months.  Mad that I was feeling defeatist, which I absolutely hate, more than pretty much any emotion.  Mad at the slightest thought that all this stress could keep me down, slow me down, take me out. Mad.  I am a fighter.  You want to throw life at me?  You want this to be a battle for two months or twelve months? You want to hit me where it hurts, think you can distract me, make me forget what I'm fighting for?  Nope.  I am a fighter. Somewhere across the world my baby is fighting too.  And he will keep on fighting until he comes home.  Then he'll learn that I fight for him.  All the stress, all the paperwork, all the sickness. Go ahead.  Bring. It. On.

. . .in all these things we are more than conquerors. . .