This may be a long post as I prepare you all for how we got to be a family of three through adoption.

I married my high school sweetheart. You read that right; I married by high school sweetheart. Not something that happens very often anymore but in our family 3 out of the 4 cousins did the same thing! Now as a parent I am not sure how much I like the idea of my 16 year old son dating a 15 year old girl. Somehow and luckily for us, it worked. I wasn’t 100% convinced I was going to marry this man while in high school or even into our first year of college but looking back I was 100% in love with him, I just didn’t know everything I needed to know at 18, 19, or even 20, heck I am not even sure I know everything I need to know now. I have learned a few things since then and whether you want to listen or not, I am going to share them with you. I will get downright personal with you all on this blog and somethings will be hard to read and some will even be hard for me to write but I have always had a way with getting things off my chest by writing them down. So, here goes nothing…

Like I previously said, I married my high school sweetheart. I was all of 15 when I met him and probably about as naive as they come to most things in life. However, as we navigated our way through a high school relationship, we also learned he was born with Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition in which a male is born with an extra copy of the X chromosome. With this diagnosis, came the harsh reality that there would be a chance that we would not be able to have biological children. That seemed like nothing I wanted to even think about in high school the diagnosis became a reality one year into our marriage. We “tried” to get pregnant for the first 6 months naturally. Most doctors will tell you to “try” for 1 year before consulting a doctor, knowing my husband’s diagnosis, we only waited 6 months before we contacted our first infertility doctor.  We sat in the doctor’s office I kept thinking “how did we end up here” everyone else around us was getting pregnant and having babies as if it were as easy as getting a drink of water. Well for us, it wasn’t that easy. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about this part of our lives ( I want to focus more on where we are in our lives now—raising an adopted son) I will expand further in my next post…

While we navigated through the options of having a family we finally settled on “artificial insemination using a donor sperm.” We also decided we would try this “method” only three times. The first two times we unsuccessful. First, let me tell you, if you don’t know what it is, the easy way to explain it is, we “picked” sperm off of a website (really this is a thing!!), it is frozen and three tubes were sent to our doctor. Which meant, we would “try” this implant 3 times. Like I said, the first two times were unsuccessful. The third time I got pregnant. I couldn’t believe it, it was really going to happen, we were really going to be parents. We of course were at the doctor often between my regular OBGYN and our infertility doctor. We were scheduled for a ultrasound at 10 weeks, instead of the usual 12 weeks. My husband and I were super exited to go to this and finally see our baby on the screen. The room was dark and of course, I had to pee like crazy, as they have you drink a million gallons it seems like before you have an ultrasound. I remember something feeling “off” when the technician was “looking around.” She then asked if I could empty my bladder. So I went to the little restroom in the room and I could hear her and my husband talking. I knew it wasn’t good. When I came back, she looked around again and then quietly said she was going to get the doctor and it appears there was no heartbeat. We were escorted to a more comfortable room and waited for our doctor to call us. The next few moments and days are more of a blur than anything for me, I will do my best to remember the ray emotions I was feeling at the time.

We drove straight from the doctors’ office to our aunt and uncles house. We have a huge family support system and I can honestly say many of them carried us through a good portion of the next 5 years as we navigated through our life as trying to become parents.  How was I now going to tell everyone who we had just told we were pregnant to that I am no longer pregnant?  Oh and to top it all off, I was hosting a baby shower for one of my cousins in four days. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t even want to be seen in public yet, but my family means the world to me and their happiness is very important to me, so I did it anyways. My aunt drew me a hot bath in their amazing bath tub and I spent the following day with my aunt. We went to two movies, back to back. Something I had never done before but it was something to take my mind off of what had happened. Before the movies, my OBGYN doctor called to inform me of my options. Options? How was I supposed to make any sort of decision at this state of mind? My options were, one, let the baby go naturally, essentially have a miscarriage. The other option was to have a D&C, which essentially is a surgical procedure in which the cervix is dilated and a special instrument is used to scrape the uterine lining. Well, boy, don’t those sound like great options? Um, no. I was supposed to be picking out names or trying to figure out if we were going to be having a boy or girl. I have never had any sort of medical procedure in my life and I certainly didn’t want this experience to be my first, so I chose the first option, let it go naturally. I am not sure I would give the same advice to someone who asked me, looking back, but in the moment it seemed like the right thing to do.  So, the wait began…

I was working about 45 minutes from home at the time and I went to work just like any other day. About half way through the day I wasn’t feeling the greatest. Really odd feeling, just not right. So I decided I should probably go home. I walked to the parking garage but before I got to the parking garage, I threw up. I was sweeting like crazy (and it was freezing outside) and I was real light headed. But stupidly I drove home. Once home I realized what was happening, I was losing the baby. Nothing will prepare you for a moment like this, I wasn’t prepared to lose as much blood as I did, even though they warn you about it. I spent the next 2 days in my bedroom, barely leaving my bed. I remember watching a movie (couldn’t tell you the movie) but I caught a glimpse of my reflection on the computer screen. And for the first time in my 24 years of life I didn’t even recognize my face- who was I? What happened? Was I going to let this situation define me? Was I going to let this part of my life, this very dark part of my life, take over my life. Don’t get me wrong, we all can have our moments to mourn, in our own ways, but I wasn’t going to let it take over. That’s when a lot of things changed…