BIRTH

Today we are waiting for a grandbaby's début. Everyone is encouraging her but she is just not ready. I find this birth process interesting. We didn’t do birth. We adopted. Now before you tell me how much easier it is to adopt than give birth I need to contrast the experience of waiting. In adoption you wait for years. There were surgeries, exams, travel, endless forms, interviews, home studies both before and after the birth. When we found out we were parents our children had been born. With Nate we had to go through a slow court system that took 2 month before we could hold him for the first time.  With our other two we found out about their birth and had hours to get ready.  Finally, after a year or two a court told us they would let us remain a family.

Early on in the birth process we knew a baby was growing. I even got to go and see the ultrasound in 3D. I have placed my hand on a round sphere where my daughter and daughter-in-law’s flat stomachs had been and felt my grandchild move.


I hear all the talk about babies dropping, dilatation, membranes, and such. Though I don’t know what the terms mean I do know I am about to experience birth again. Holding a child so new was an experience I can’t describe (thank you so much Erica for being so sensitive to this need) and I am about to have the experience again.

My daughter, like almost all women before her will experience pain. After my daughter decides she doesn’t need to experience all the birth experience the doctors will give her an epidural to block the pain. Then she will be a mother.

I am so grateful that I could be a mother. I don’t have words to express how grateful I am for three wonderful women who went through the birth process and then gave me their babies. If I was given the choice between birth and adoption I would choose adoption for only one reason. I wouldn’t want any other children other than Nate, Andrea and Ben. But… I wonder what it would have been like.