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Infertility: Part 4 (Wrestling with Doubt)

(For background info, see Infertility, part 0, 1, 2, and 3.)

In August of 2001, we drove across the country. The various national parks that we visited were a welcome distraction from the thoughts of infertility which were dangling just outside of my awareness, held at bay by hope and denial. When we arrived in Portland, we moved in with my sister, settling in to a nice space above the garage.

And once we got settled in, I could no longer ignore the infertility issues. I went to the doctor and got retested. The results confirmed the first set of tests. I was now convinced, but that didn't stop the doctor from ordering another set of tests. I gave another sample, and the results were amazingly consistent with the other two.

So.

Now it was time to think about adoption again.

Having already considered AI and IVF (see part 3) and discarding them as unfeasible, adoption seemed to be the only way that we could have children. When we first discovered that I had a distressingly low sperm count, Tree was immediately ready to start the adoption process. I was not. When she wanted to know why I was unwilling, I told her that I needed time to get used to the idea. "You've been thinking about it for 14 years. I've only been thinking about it for 14 days. Give me time..." I assured her, "I'll warm up to the idea."

By the time I had gotten re-tested and re-re-tested, it had been months. And I hadn't yet warmed up to the idea. "Maybe remaining childless wouldn't be so bad," I thought. After all, only a short time before this (less than two years previous), I was fighting to not have children (see part 0). However, I knew that as much as I may waver on the issue, Tree's position was never in question: she wanted children.

Adoption scared me. One of the reasons I had been reluctant to become a parent in the first place was that I knew that it was a huge responsibility. With something that big and that important, I knew that self-doubt would cause me to make lots of mistakes. And I was very good at doubting myself. My fear with adoption was that my self-doubt would overwhelm me. I feared that I would always be asking myself, "Would I have loved my child more if she (I had always envisioned having a daughter) were a biological child instead of an adopted one?" That one question would cripple me. As long as I was asking myself that question, I guaranteed that I would be failing my child on a number of different fronts.

I know myself. I know how I think. I know how I act. I would not and could not be a good parent until I had answered that question definitively in the negative. I needed to wrestle my doubts to the ground and pin them into certainty before I could adopt a child.

So I wrestled.

Day after day and week after week I wrestled. And each day my self-doubt refused to be mastered.