Christopher’s Mom

By Nancy Ferrari

It’s a typical Saturday of running errands, and we decide to have lunch out. I slide into the booth after a visit to the ladies room.

“This place is loaded with babies.” I chirp my public service announcement. They’re EV-rywhere.”

“Oh yeah?” my husband Greg answers.

“Yup. You wanna know what’s really great?”

He bites. “What’s that?”

“It doesn’t make me sad!”

Greg smiles and takes the bottle out of our son Christopher’s mouth. “That’s good!” he states affirmatively.

After 7 years of infertility treatment—back in the days of Pergonal and GIFT procedures and before the age of Follistim and PGD—and after 7 years of ignoring the problem while dealing with a live-in mother-in-law with Alzheimer’s disease, I was pretty sure that I would remain forever emotionally hobbled by infertility. The one thing I was sure I was meant to do, be a mom, I simply couldn’t.

I know. What about adoption? We thought about it. It can be scary and complicated. And worse, it lacks the illusion of control that infertility treatment offers. I was good, no, superb, at planning treatment cycles and figuring out the next step. I could show up at appointments and egg retrievals. I could regroup from a miscarriage. But how do you create a family through the grace of a stranger? I didn’t know. After 14 years of desperately wanting a baby, I was still pretty sure that adoption wasn’t for us.

I was wrong on both counts. I’m happy and feel whole for the first time in a very long time. I’m a glowing advocate of adoption. I am a mom.

The seed of Christopher’s adoption was actually a pregnancy. My own. At 45 I decided to make one final check in with a reproductive endocrinologist. To what end, I wasn’t completely sure, maybe some kind of closure. She told me what I already knew. At my age, IVF with my own eggs was as good as trying on our own. In two words: Not very. Maybe 1%. Egg donation was an option, so was adoption, she told me. Greg, who suspected that this doctor’s visit would only rip the scab off a wound that was struggling to heal, was not pleased. We were past all of that, and it wasn’t something he was keen to revisit. We were too old. He wasn’t comfortable with egg donation or adoption. He was resolved about remaining childless. I just wasn’t.

This was a hard time for us. He didn’t want to hurt me. I understood his view, but had a terrible time accepting it. I had been taking my temperature just to “keep track of my cycles” and I noticed, two weeks after that very doctor’s appointment, they hadn’t dropped as I expected. Just for “fun” I took a home pregnancy test. Two lines. Dark ones. Shockingly, our first betas were better than any previous pregnancy. Not so shockingly, they stalled and at 7 weeks, I miscarried for the fifth time.

I was furious, this was so cruel. Especially cruel because my last chance had been stolen and Greg wasn’t willing to try egg donation. I roiled at him until he cracked. In all the years we’d struggled with infertility, he never showed me his own grief directly. Now it was right in front of me. The loss was profound for him too. We both truly did want to be a family of more than two. After a week of spending my spare time sobbing uncontrollably, we decided to talk with the counselor who had seen me through my long years of infertility treatment.

Somehow in that conversation, the seed of adoption sprouted just a little. The idea of international adoption, particularly from China, resonated with Greg. Two weeks later we started a home study and in record time submitted a dossier to adopt from China. Several months later, we could see that the wait for a referral was slowing to a crawl. I was beside myself. Every time I got close to a baby something went wrong. Certainly, the timeframe made our plans to adopt twice from China questionable. Greg suggested that we consider biracial domestic adoption for our second child. And adopt our second child first, while waiting for China.

The story of Christopher’s adoption would take a book. It was more fraught than most, including his birth parents changing their minds at his birth. And changing their minds back 3 weeks later. When things fell through the first time, several adoption professionals—and adoptive parents—told me, when you get “your” baby all the pain and aggravation goes away. It just goes away. I didn’t believe them. Not until Christopher was placed in our arms.

Holding my baby for the first time was a moment I had imagined for years. It didn’t involve me lying in a hospital bed or at a birthing center. In fact, I was standing in a small office surrounded by file cabinets and some of the wonderful people who worked on Christopher’s placement. And it was better than anything I had pictured. I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. This was meant to be. My heart was restored. I was normal, I was who I was meant to be. They were right all along.

I was a mom.

I’ve tried hard to figure out what held us, me, back for so long. Surely, adoption is not an easy thing to do. There is paperwork and intrusion and hoops to jump through. You feel like you have to “qualify” for what is a simple biological certainty for others. But for me, I think it was something that I can put words to only now. Adoption requires that you embrace loss. The birth parents’ loss, your child’s loss, and your own. I think that was the hardest for me. Truly acknowledging that I would never give birth.

Greg instantly bloomed into a wonderful, natural father. He is amazing. That didn’t surprise me at all. I was a little taken aback at the ferocious love we feel for this child. How I couldn’t love him one iota more if he came from my body. That I wouldn’t want him to have come from my body because he wouldn’t be him. I didn’t expect to feel fully prepared to help him deal with whatever losses he may feel as he grows up. But I did expect to wonder if, because I didn’t carry him for 9 months or give birth to him, I would truly be his mother. And that did happen a little bit, but with each passing day, I realize just how much we belong to each other. I am his mother. I cannot imagine being anyone else’s mother. We can’t imagine being anyone else’s parents. It’s the best thing ever. We were meant to be.

In the future, I might feel my infertility scar flare up at the announcement of a pregnancy or birth. But I’ve survived infertility. And, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but actually thrived as a result. Because it made me Christopher’s mom.

Nancy Ferrari is a medical writer who lives in Newton, Mass. with her husband Greg, son Christopher, and two Labrador retrievers, Jenny and Eliot. They are looking forward to expanding their family again through adoption sometime soon.