{by Lindsey from I Digress: Tales from a Baby-Starved Wingnut}

We are in a house of windows. In a glass house, which is ironic if you’ve been with me for the past 72 hours. Storms are rolling in back to back, rain is coming down in hard sheets. The wedding is outside. Or was supposed to be. Our host has an 80′s love music compilation CD playing in a house-wide stereo system. The bride stands at the window just outside of the yellow lamp light and watches the rain while REO Speedwagon plays in the background. I am oddly reminded of the movie Forces of Nature, where the bride waits in the hurricane for her groom.

It has been a long road to this day. The family is held together by gossamer threads of duty. The grandmother might not come, people are not speaking.

I don’t fit in with these girls. Of all the bridesmaids I am the only one that only knows the bride through the groom. I gravitate to the mother of the bride. Something about the entire day makes me need a mother.

****

I am getting my makeup done. The artist asks if I have babies. I say no, and don’t offer any explanation. When she asks me what I want my eyes to look like, I say dark and heavy.

****

I am getting my hair done. The hairdresser asks me if I have babies. I offer a slightly more hopeful answer than I gave the makeup artist and say, not yet! She does big, loopy curls in my hair while she eats a sandwich and I try not to worry about her dripping mayo on my back. She says her GPS brought her here, she has never been so far out in the country. I laugh. She says, seriously . . . where are we? I tell her the honest answer, that I don’t know. I am just as lost as she is.

****

Every hour the tension increases. The bride is screechy and stressed, her sisters hate her behind her back. Our host, her aunt, gives us a talk about Jesus Christ and His Plan. If His Plan is for rain on your wedding day, you accept it. She says: You have to bend to his will. Submit. What he wants is what you get. I think: Jesus sounds like an angry toddler. She says that one year her husband and her decided to celebrate their anniversary with Jesus. Her husband got her a card that said: Happy Anniversary to you, me and JC! The bride sets her plate down and walks out of the room.

****

The Aunt’s job is to be the time enforcer. In the last 15 minutes she yells the time left before we have to leave every minute. TEN MINUTES, she screams. Peter Cetera sings in the background. NINE MINUTES. My bag is packed by the front door, I stand there with my dress over my arm, it’s making sweaty creases in my skin. EIGHT MINUTES. When it gets down to the last two minutes the bride begins the epic meltdown. She is screaming at everyone except me, because I haven’t even gone near her in the last 2 hours.

*****

I am in the backseat of the car on the way to the ceremony. I hate the backseat, I get carsick. The maid of honor is driving. The bride is rocking back and forth with her veil neatly tucked in her stiff hair, chanting something about hating everyone. Her little sister is in the back with me. We are both texting people about how badly we want to be somewhere (anywhere) else. Her sister says: I swear, she is normally a nice person.

*****

We use umbrellas to shield her on the way in, because the groom is in the parking lot. When it’s time to put on her dress and its not fitting she screams and tells everyone to get away from her. The rain stops long enough to get our pictures taken outside. All of our heels sink into the mud. We forget that we are supposed to have bouquets. We are unhappy and tired but we smile radiantly any time someone raises a camera. I see B across the way, in his tux, and my eyes water. It’s the first thing that’s moved me all day.

{Originally published on We Make Three}

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I’ve been married to Michael for nearly 20 years. This man saved me. I’m not kidding. And I will always love him for that.

I was only 20 when we got married. Even at that young age, I realized that I had everything to learn about life. We both understood that starting a family would wait while we developed ourselves, our careers, and focused on our marriage. We had nothing for our start together other than the china and crystal from our wedding registry. Not even a couch. It was a meager beginning, but still a heady time for us. We had nothing but each other and our independence. I love how we started our relationship, and I love that we sacrificed and made our way without any help.

Life happened to us. We bought our home, built our careers, and enjoyed our lives together. We got our dog, a little Yorkie I named Chester, who became the perfect vessel for my maternal outpourings. We talked about kids. A lot. Michael is very practical. Pragmatic. He looks at the facts and makes very accurate assessments. We discussed the commitment, sacrifice, and change in our lifestyle that having a family would require. We were ready.

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Originally published at Coming 2 Terms by Pamela Jeanne

Sometimes I’m asked why we stopped pursuing infertility treatment. For
those looking for easy answers you won’t find them here. There was no
epiphany, no dramatic denouement. We were not driven there by a
deadline or a master plan or even an entirely drained bank account.
(Even today, resisting the ever-beckoning siren song of the fertility
industry’s latest advancements has not been particularly easy.)

Our
move away from treatment was a long, slow often circuitous process that
sometimes led us back like a junkie in need of a fix to the
reproductive endocrinology clinic for one more attempt. A little voice
in my head kept egging me on (no pun intended): just one more IUI; one
more round of acupuncture; one more laparoscopy; one more blood test to
determine if there’s a new factor we hadn’t considered or addressed –
all the while the doctors scratched their heads with no clear
explanation for our infertility, dampening our hopes further that we’d
ever succeed.

Strung-out and wondering how we would possibly
cope with another failed cycle, I started to allow myself to imagine a
life not driven by 28-day cycles and endless associated vigils. With
the benefit of lots of exhaustive and exhausting conversations,
and after consuming huge amounts of reading material on coping with
infertility, my husband and I finally began to loosen the tight grip we
had on our increasingly fragile dream.

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Originally published on Krississippi, the Fifty First State of the Union

Another adoptive parent blogger wrote about her son’s adoption not being ’second best’ compared to having a biological child, and it got me thinking about my son’s adoption.

The fact that my FIRST choice in “how to become a parent” was to adopt (totally bypassing the very idea of doing it the ‘natural’ way) is an abstract concept that is often misunderstood…

… but I don’t feel guilty that my son was adopted.

As far as stereotypes go, I’m probably the MOST hated ‘adopter’ (at least in the anti-adoption world) in that I’m simply seen as ‘baby stealer’ – my child came to me as a first choice and I had no intentions in my lifetime (for as far back as I can remember!) to ever have a biological child.

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Originally posted on: Xbox4NappyRash

Dear Spencer,

I know you are only one among millions down there,
but you’re the one I feel I have a connection with, the one I can talk
to. I see you as a leader among men. Well, semen at least.

We’ve been through a lot together, you, your buddies and me. Remember the first time we met? That was an eye opener, certainly was for my stuffed animals anyway.

Over
the next few years we had lot of good times, we met up with each other
at every opportune moment, and quite a few inopportune ones.

In fact, to date, I can only think of one single occasion where we met that wasn’t entirely pleasurable.

But things are changing…I’m not gonna butter you up, I’m gonna tell it to you straight. You need to get your act together down there and get your crew in order.

Lets look at the facts.

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