There is this weird stillness in the house where you’re not really sure how to feel. Is it happiness or sadness or exhaustion or simply an entirely new emotion that has yet to be named that comes at the end of a long journey.

I think I just wrote my final words for the book.

Since all of the chapters were written out of order, and even sections within the chapter were written as a thought struck, I wrote my final thoughts on a section about milestones in the Parenting after Infertility chapter (and…um…hint hint hint to my editor, please leave this sentence in so this post makes sense years down the road):

“It took time to get to a place where I could see the joy in the event through the tears.”

I don’t think I could have written something more fitting for a last line if I tried. What a long strange journey this book has been. And for me, it has this bizarre significance with so much that came before it. Four years ago this week, I was finishing my last book: the one that I had stopped writing so I could focus on treatments and subsequently lost out on the book deal. And now, once again, on the very same week, I have finished a book that I stopped treatments to write. It is this bizarre world of yin and yang. An inverse of an experience.

The number four is not lost on me either with its importance in gematria (which, by the way, I never believe in until it has significance to me and then I believe it with all my heart–sort of like my horoscope). Four is equated with creation. And what does it all boil down to beyond balancing out our different paths towards creation. We create on small levels every single day even when we dismiss those small creations because we’re not achieving the big creations. Sitting with that final line, it made me realize how long it took to apply it to everywhere else in life too: seeing the joy through the tears. Noticing the small creations amongst the large ones. And not dismissing any part of life in order to experience another.

This has been a horrible week for reasons that are not mine to tell. I am always shy about telling someone else’s story on this blog–even the twins and Josh–because their story is not my story to tell. But all through this week, when I start crying, Josh keeps reminding me about the joy and I keep dismissing it with only noticing the source for the tears. And I think I needed to write that last line in so many more ways than just as a closure to a final chapter.

This does not mean the book is actually finished. Isn’t that confusing? I now enter a month of edits with the editor and turn in the final manuscript in September. And then it has to go through a bunch of other edits and changes and waiting until it comes out on bookshelves next spring. And by that time, I hope to be firmly ensconced in the other book I have felt was missing from shelves and am planning to write after this one (that’s another hint–this time to the publisher). So, this is merely a pause inside all of the activity still to come. But that was the last new line on the first draft of the manuscript.

I wanted to mark this stillness in some way because it feels so odd even though I know what happens next. And I want to apologize publicly to my editor for being so wordy.

I am celebrating with water ice this afternoon and in diving into stuff for the Bridges site. And just running with the new energy that builds out of the stillness.

This is the fourteenth installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

We live in a country where adoption is not that common, and domestic adoption is usually of children who have been in foster care – it is free to the adopters, but carries all the risks many people will be aware of, and it is very rare to adopt young infants either through this route or through overseas adoption – the usual age range is 12 months to 3 years or older. Both take quite a long time. We are nonetheless currently veering towards foster adoption.

However, I am a US citizen (though my husband is not, and is not a permanent resident either) and we are due to spend a bit less than a year in the US very shortly. I am wondering in a very, very unformed way what would be the prospects of domestic adoption for us if we were to start immediately once we arrived in the US. We could spend longer if we were matched with a child as we have a generous adoption leave allowance, but I’m not sure what the chances are of going through the approval process in the time we have (8 months), getting a match in that time, actually being legally eligible for US domestic adoption if we aren’t permanently resident even though I’m a citizen, as I gather the rules have recently changed us getting a match at all.

To give you an idea of where we are coming from: We are both professionals, and I work in a very child-centered field. I’m just over 40 and my husband is about 10 years older, we have led what we regard as principled lives, and are liberal politically. We aren’t planning to become full time stay-at-home parents (but as I mentioned we get very generous adoption leave, and part-time work is also an option), we could certainly give a child a very varied set of experiences (especially regarding travel, obviously) and we would be very open to the idea of open adoption (all domestic adoption in our home country is either open or semi-open), including returning to the US to visit birth parents. We’d also be open to the idea of adopting a mixed-race child (we are white).

We will be living in the state I last lived in, and where I think open adoption is the most common kind. We would be renting though we own our own home where we normally live. From reading potential adoptive parents profiles, we are not typical in a number of ways. But perhaps that is good (she says, hopefully)? I’m at the stage where I’m just rolling this idea round in my head, really, so perhaps some good hard common sense would be best for me!

–Anonymous

I’m unfortunately going to have to pee in your cheerios and come at you with some…well, it’s not common sense insomuch as its things you need to consider. There are huge logistical hoops that US residents (who are not on a time line) need to jump through in order to pursue domestic adoption including finding a slot with an agency, collecting paperwork, fingerprinting, letters of reference, completing a home study, house inspection. Some of those tasks are within your control (if you want to put your nose to the grindstone, you can choose how long it takes you to fill out the forms) and others are not. If you cannot be fit in for several weeks for your home study, you have lost several weeks from the back end (the waiting period) of your process. So, with eight months, you’re looking at a tight squeeze even with a best-case scenario.

Domestic adoption takes (on average) between a year and a year-and-a-half. Most domestic adoptions take place within a two year period. Average is the operative word. There are people who match a few weeks after getting in the books. There are others who take a lot longer.

But think about it this way: someone who is dating and wants to get married can do a few things to speed along the process. They can put themselves out there, untangle themselves from dead-end prospects early on, and aggressively pursue set-ups. But they can’t do anything to ensure that they can get married within a time frame. I’m sure someone could do a study and say that people who aggressively pursue marriage on average get married within two years of beginning the marriage process, but think back to when you were single: was it truly within your control when marriage occurred? It felt for me, at least, like statistics be damned. I had no clue whether or not I’d get married and I can’t imagine the pressure I would have felt if I had a time frame where I needed it to happen.

Which is actually the part that worries me most–the emotional journey you’ll put yourself through having an end date (however loose) in place. If you put yourself through all of that work and it doesn’t happen, will you be able to go home without a child and several thousand dollars poorer?

If the answer is that you could walk away with peace of heart at least knowing you tried, I can give you three pieces of advice. There are probably going to be those who will write in the comment section below about how this arrangement isn’t fair to expectant parents (and I have to be frank, taking a child immediately and permanently out-of-country goes against part of the philosophy of open adoption) or to the child, but my concern with this question is you, the question-asker. Therefore, I am only addressing your side of things.

(1) Be absolutely honest and clear when conversing with expectant parents what your limitations are in terms of open adoption. They need to know where you live in order to have their own peace of heart with the decision. Don’t make any promises that you can’t keep.

(2) Expand your search to national rather than keeping in-state. This means you must be willing to travel at a moments notice and you will possibly need to remain in the state where the baby is born until you are cleared by a court and given permission to take the child out of state. It’s one more hoop, but a national search is going to move faster statistically over an in-state search.

(3) Start the process from home right now, working with a US agency and perhaps securing an adoption attorney for the state where you’ll be living. They are going to know the laws that apply not only to all US adoptions but to laws specific to each state. Yes, it will add another cost to the process, but an attorney can guide you through choices in the interest of time. There are specialized attorneys working in the field of adoption and ART (Elizabeth Swire Falker, for example, works out of NY and her practice in family law specifically covers adoption, donor gamet
e contracts, etc) and I’d search for one by state and then check credentials (please do this–there are a lot of people working within adoption who are not kosher and you want an ethical adoption).

Sending a lot of luck for the journey. I don’t know how feasible it would be to move back to the US for a few years right now rather than just a few months. If that were the case, it would change some of the information above and take a lot of the pressure off the process. In the end, you want to love your life and bring a baby into it rather than have a baby be the element bringing peace to your life (in other words, a child should be the cherry on top and not the dish holding the ice cream…um…and in this analogy, the ice cream is you). Therefore, if your happy life is back in your current home, I would never recommend moving because a dish full of ice cream is still sweet. But if “home” is simply your marriage and you want a new adventure together, moving to a new place could open a lot of doors in the pursuit of the cherry on top.

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely. I would love to hear from anyone who has pursued domestic adoption and the time frame you faced with the process.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.

You’re probably wondering about the new button on my sidebar (since over 100 of you have clicked over and probably scratched your heads since there wasn’t an explanation there until this morning). This is a great big bloggy project that has been slowly growing with time and exploded with discussion at BlogHer. I encourage you to add your blog to the blogroll if you’re open to bridges being built and outsiders coming in. It is pretty bare-bones at the moment. I am still lining up editors and reaching out to individual communities and adding new communities to the list. All ideas are welcome.

Welcome back to Show and Tell. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. In fact, we hope you do go back to your blog and post your own Show and Tell item and then return with the link to your post. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

This morning we went to something called Farm Tour Days which is a two-day period in our county where all of the local farms host a huge party with bouncey castles, hayrides, and 4-H displays. We went to the aforementioned farm where I once peed in the pumpkin patch (you better believe I had an impassioned discussion with the Wolvog about the importance of peeing before you leave the house). The ChickieNob was lured over to the vegetable art table where she constructed Arthur out of cucumbers, blueberries, green beans, and toothpicks. Oh, and carrot eyes.

As luck would have it, we fell deeply in love with Arthur; enough to kiss him and to hold him back from the demolition vegetable races. “Why would anyone want to speed Arthur down a hill in a roller skate?” the ChickieNob exclaimed, begging me to wrap up her vegetable love in a plastic bag and transport him to the steamy trunk of our car.

He lasted a few hours on our kitchen counter and was buried in our kitchen rubbish bin. Oh Arthur.

What are you showing today?

Want to bring something to Show and Tell?

• If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Sunday (or earlier in the weekend or on Monday if you can’t do Sunday), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item.
• Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink in the comments section below (make sure you don’t just comment that you participated: add a link to your blog in your comment so people can click over). I post a new Show and Tell post every Saturday night or Sunday. I usually move people up into the body of the post every few hours.
• Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week.
• If you want it…
  I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to the archives.

I shut off the Internet for a huge chunk of today. And then the siren song of IE mingles with the husky notes of Firefox. And you end up back here anyway.

Thank you. For the ice cream flavours. For not sending my garbage back to me. I had wanted just to say it aloud; not hear it again. Just send it away from me and stand inside my visualization technique without holding that information anymore. Sometimes, I need to talk about something, discuss every small details of how I feel and what I think. Talk out every single one of my fears. But I realized, trying to Domar myself into calm with this visualization of the ice cream store that I was juggling this knowledge that I just had to release. That I didn’t want to set down and pick up again once I was finished with my cone. I didn’t want to keep seeing it on the table. I wanted to toss it in the rubbish bin and have the top snap closed and not think about any of my fears until they were handed back to me after I left the store. But I wanted my time inside my mental ice cream store to be unfettered and focused entirely on examining ice cream flavours.

And it sort of worked. At least, the ice cream store worked for me more than the beach (which was my Domar visualization space until I dumped it last night). There is more to see in an ice cream shop. You can peer into every damn container. At the beach, there is just the water lapping onto the sand. A crab scuttling by. I do find peace when I am on an actual beach, but I find it harder to slip into the sensation of relaxation when I am tense. Accessing the happiness inherent in an ice cream store is much more immediate. You know how you can end up smiling for a moment and laughing even when you’re in the middle of a funeral? I think momentary happiness (or feigned laughter) is easier to obtain than bringing yourself physically into relaxation when you are tense. And sometimes, tension is relieved–albeit infinitesimally–by happiness.

At least, that is my belief.

It worked well for me, therefore, I offer it back to you. But with the twist I used last night.

The ice cream store contains an enormous red garbage bin towards the back, one of those swinging top numbers where things can go in and not come back out. The flap stops moving and you forget anything is lurking in there. The comment section is this huge, red rubbish bin.

Come in the store and dump whatever you need to dump in the garbage bin before you get on-line to order. Take your emotional garbage, anything you need to release and send it there. Literally write it out and we will all carry your trash mentally to that red bin and toss it with you. Release it and we will give you nothing else back in return. We will not ask you about the garbage you tossed out. We will not remind you that you threw anything in the can (this is the important part). In other words, once you release it and toss it away, it will not come back to you. That is my only rule of the ice cream store (with the exception of garbage that is so toxic that someone is scared to have it in the bin because it really needs a different receptacle). If you read something in the hypothetical garbage bin, it remains in the hypothetical garbage bin and you do not remind the person of it later or inquire about it.

I once had a temporary tattoo of a fish, still it its packaging. I have no idea how I even obtained this fish tattoo. But terrible things kept happening. The tattoo was in my pocket and I had an ovarian cyst rupture and needed to go to the emergency room. I left it in my car and a tree fell on the car. When I mentioned the connection of all of these events and the fish tattoo, my mother suggested that I simply throw it away.

But she didn’t want it tossed out in the house.

I took it to the nearest Baskin Robbins.

I think about that every time I see that store.

While you are mentally in the ice cream store, your trash is gone. When you leave the ice cream store, you may have someone hand you back your burden again. Feel free to throw it out a second time. Truly, releasing those thoughts away from myself last night was the key to getting through this day and all of the subsequent appointments we now have scheduled over the next few weeks. Once you toss your trash thoughts–the ones that are cluttering up your mind and making it impossible to make a choice at the ice cream store–get in line. Don’t turn around and look at the bin. Your focus becomes the brightly coloured cartons of ice cream.

This mental ice cream store is open indefinitely. It will be linked for easy access from the sidebar. Feel free to use it whenever you need it. Selfish to the core, I plan to use this space and dump here whenever I am feeling anxious.