This has been a long time coming… To be honest it’s just been too hard to write, and while it was locked away in my head it didn’t have to be real. Now so much more has happened that I feel I can not put it off any longer… it’s going to be insanely long, I’m sorry for that.
Here we go…
I think Ryan and I are pretty much done officially trying to conceive, or having a family in any other way.
We have explored and subsequently exhausted numerous options including but not necessarily limited to: adoption, foster care, IUI (in uterine insemination), IVF (in vitro fertilization), and surrogacy. I’m just going to quickly address each issue and how it has become a non option for us.
I ask you to keep a few things in mind as you read this.
1) No one has the same situation in life. What is true for you may not be true for us. We face many difficulties that may not apply to your situation or the situations of the people you’ve heard stories about. These issues include but are not limited to: We are military, we do not live stateside, my health post op, Ryan’s health, and Ryan’s job and current deployment situation.
2) Not one of these decisions has been come to easily or without innumerable tears and prayers.
3) We have explored EVERY angle of these options and our decisions regarding them are final unless new information comes to light and we decide (with much prayer and discussion) to pursue one again.
4) Money. I would be an idiot to say money was not an issue. Though 8 years of marriage and good financial planning have made us solvent we are still a single income family and our finances would take a substantial hit with any of these options. So though money would not stop us from using any of these options (if there weren’t many other obstacles) it defiantly keeps us from ‘trying anyway.’
ADOPTION
This of course is the big one. We have been asked over and over why we don’t adopt. First and foremost, we have prayed long and hard about this. Neither of us has ever once felt a go ahead or a release to move forward on this. It’s a rather large thing to do without a feeling of peace and so we’ve held back. If you know either of us you will know that this hasn’t stopped us from looking into it rather deeply “just in case”.
We have spent the last few years digging around for information on this option including making phone calls and putting out feelers on both local and international adoption. The answers we have received have been extremely discouraging.
Military adoptions are next to impossible. Yes, there are military families that succeed and I’m sure there are some that do so with next to no fuss. But the facts are these;
Adoption agencies shy away from military families. They have many reasons for doing so but it all boils down to this. They believe that the lifestyle we are forced to live in service to our country is far too unstable for a child and therefore they do not even work with military families. (This forces me to wonder what they think of AF families that have children but that is neither here nor there.) There are exceptions to this rule but they are few and far between and you really need to be blessed with;
a) residence in the state of one of the few agencies willing to work with you. (We have NO idea where we will be living when we leave Germany and won’t know until April/May of 2009)
And
b) a spouse that will be home for the majority of the process (We have just received news that Ryan will be gone for the majority of every year for the next 6 to 8 years of his career. More on that later.)
This problem is so prominent with military families that the military actually offers a financial grant to an adoptive family. It is a grant specifically for the extra paperwork required by a cooperating agency. It’s for 1500 dollars. Yep you read that right. A military couple has 1500 dollars worth of extra paperwork for an adoption than a regular family.
As a result of that extra bureaucracy the average waiting time for a military family to be placed with a child is 6 to 8 years. (That is for a fully open adoption. I have no idea how that changes if you have any preferences) If you are lucky enough to find an agency to work with you, you must be stationed in the states and have housing in order to begin the process. (We will not be in this position until September/October of next year and have a 90% chance that Ryan will be leaving within 1 or 2 months of that time for another 6 month deployment. This puts us BEGINNING this 6 to 8 year process sometime in the summer of 2010.)
Perhaps if we had had the release and begun the process years ago alongside our TTC journey it would have been an option. In all honesty, if we were somehow able to go forward with adopting today I don’t know if we could… After all the heartache and pain this past seven and a half years have brought us I don’t know if we could face the prospect of beginning all over again.
FOSTER CARE
Foster care holds many if not all of the same objections as adoption. There are some differences of course but they actually make it harder for us. Fostering in an unstable home (Remember that Ryan will be gone half of every year) is not encouraged and frankly I can understand this. I don’t see how it’s fair to the child either. A majority of foster care kids have special circumstances and needs and providing an ever shifting environment would be hard on them when what they really need is stability.
Top that off with the fact that Ryan is Tuberculosis positive. He has inactive TB. Being exposed to an active TB strain could and most probably would kill him. There is no cure if his TB goes active. Foster children are frequently exposed to TB and there is an implication from the Air Force that we would not be approved if we went forward with this inquiry as it puts a government asset (Ryan) at unnecessary risk.
IUI/IVF
I’m going to explain these two together because really the same argument applies to both. First let me say that the military does not pay for either and so money is, of course, a big factor in this.
Money aside…
Ryan is normal and healthy and I have been diagnosed with ‘UNEXPLAINED INFERTILITY.’ Doctors have not been able to pinpoint what is wrong with my body. There is nothing (they can find medically) wrong with me and so there is a bit of a mental block about paying thousands of dollars to get pregnant when there is no medical reason I can’t.
Don’t worry, I have a more solid reason than that. IVF and IUI are geared towards getting you pregnant. I can get pregnant (though it’s difficult) I have been pregnant three times. My issue is with STAYING pregnant.
Why would we pay thousands of dollars for a more high tech miscarriage? Until doctors can figure out why I’m incapable of carrying a baby I’m not going to get pregnant time after time… that doesn’t seem to make any sense to either of us.
So for now these are off the table.
SURRAGACY
I’m not going to lie… this one is about money. Ryan and I did some extensive research on this because we had received a few offers from potential surrogates. Basically when the chips are down and the hidden fees revealed we are looking at 40,000 dollars just to get the woman pregnant and then the cost of her medical bills/insurance and the ‘financial gift’ you are legally obligated to pay. On top of that all the same risks apply. What if the problem is not me but my eggs? What if the surrogate mother has a miscarriage?
It’s too much money for too many what ifs.
TRYING TO CONCEIVE ON OUR OWN
The truth has been apparent to Ryan and I for years. There is something very wrong with my body. We need more extensive professional help. In our quest for answers circumstance after circumstance has cropped up to stop us from getting that help.
My other health problems, deployments, clinic closures, miscarriages, surgery, doctors who aren’t trained in this area but refuse to give referrals, incompetent doctors who waste months of my life giving me the run around, my records being lost for the entire year that we had medical help here in Germany. I could go on and on… suffice it to say that we have done our very best to get better help and it has simply not been within our grasp once in the past 7 and a half years.
We are worn out, we are tired. We are afraid for our bodies as studies are coming out about the long term affects of fertility drugs and we find that we have been on them for more cycles than is now recommended to avoid cancer.
We promised each other that when we moved back stateside and got settled in we would pursue hard and fast medical assistance for one year. If at the end of one year we had made no progress we would quit because we are exhausted mentally, physically and spiritually.
In the last few month things have aligned in such a way that make even this pretty much impossible.
The career field that Ryan is part of in the Air Force is critically manned. That’s why he was cross trained into it. Over the last three years the numbers have continued to plummet despite a flurry of new rules and regulations, more cross training, and higher retention incentives. As a result the whole field is going to an increased deployment tempo if you are an NCO or above. (Ryan is.) This means that he will be deployed for the majority of every year for the next 6 to 8 years of his career.
We move back to the states for good in mid July of next year. It will take 8 to 12 weeks for our household goods and our car to arrive at our new base, for us to find a new home, for our records to be instated into the new base and for us to get our first physicals so that we can pursue infertility help.
Ryan becomes eligible to deploy between September and December of that same year. (In short... he's gone pretty much the moment we're settled in.)
We won’t be able to try at all until probably the summer of 2010. And if we get in quickly we’ll have six to 8 months before we have to put the whole thing on hold again.
Top this all off with the fact that my body is broken. I haven’t had a period for over 6 months and I have no way to address this issue until I get back stateside. There are serious health implications to go along with that too that also need to be addressed.
I am well aware that God can do anything at any time. I am well aware that we only need things to work out one time. I am well aware that it’s not over until it’s over.
Believe me when I say that we would be overwhelmed with joy if we were blessed with an unexpected pregnancy.
Please also believe me when I tell you that we are surrendering our hopes for a family. You know some of what we’ve been through but not all, you’ve seen pieces of our heart but you can’t know the whole of it. The simple truth is that we have begged, pleaded, cried out and bargained with God for a family and we have been met with silence for almost 8 years.
In this past year the answer has turned from silence to a gentle but firm NO.
I do not pretend to know the whole of God’s plans for our lives… I do not even pretend to know a part of it. I'm not arrogant enough to say that this word is the final word for us. But until God directs us a different way this is it, for now I think we must allow this journey to become a path we have finished walking… without the end we had hoped for.
Ryan and Courtney
P.S. I realize that this may sound churlish. However, I would like to ask you to refrain from telling us;
“You didn’t hear God right. This can’t be the answer.”
“You will believe for us anyway since we’ve lost faith.”
(Trust me when I say we have not lost faith. I personally believe that accepting less takes more faith than hoping for more.)
“Now that you’ve stopped trying you’ll get pregnant just wait and see.” Or “You just need to relax and it will happen.”
(This is simply not true. We’re talking about an 8 year journey here not a few months. We have serious medical issues not nerves.)
Or any other platitude. I realize that these are said in earnest concern and in most cases in love but the truth is that they act more as barbs than balms.
I hope this does not offend anyone but I can’t help but ask this of you.
