Doesn't play well with others.

Adoption is wildly expensive. If you're lucky you'll be able to work with an agency that is willing to charge only a percentage of your annual income. Most of the time, though, it's going to cost a lot more than that. At the time that we were looking at adoption our costs would have wound up being more than half of our combined annual income. Not that we could have adopted anyway, probably. Our age, the husband's marital history, finances, everything was against us, not least my own ambivalence about adoption.

We looked into adoption because it was seeming increasingly impossible to have a child any other way. Month after month was going past with no response to the fertility drugs at all, other than a mad desire to shoot myself whilst screaming dementedly at the poor husband for breathing too loudly. Oh, and hot flashes. Horrible, killer, throw-yourself-naked-into-the-Arctic-Ocean hot flashes.

Adoption, however, made me nervous. One of my high school friends was adopted. He talked all the time about finding his "real" parents. Other adoptee friends I've had were the same. One woman told me how happy she was to have found her biological mother and how much better she fit in with her biological family than her adoptive family. Others said much the same thing. Even the husband, who was adopted by his stepfather, had said in the past how he never felt like he truly belonged.

I couldn't shake those thoughts when we talked about adopting. I didn't want to be a second best mother. The worst thing I could think of would be to love a child, to put my heart and soul into raising a son or daughter, and then have my child just walk away to find the "real" mother that I could never be. I saw myself as a stand-in only, a years-long babysitter, endured, borne, but never loved. Just someone to put up with until the happy family could be reunited.

I know that's not rational and only part of it comes from hearing those stories, I'm sure. At least part of this comes from the pain of being a stepmother, too. But it's there, and I never could shake it. I don't think I could ever let a child go in search of his or her biological family with anything but deep hurt and anger, and I couldn't justify adoption under those circumstances. Children deserve a mother without that much fear about their relationship.

Of course, if we hadn't eventually conceived who knows what I might have decided?