The Road Not Taken

Today I am 17 weeks pregnant. It is difficult to wrap my brain around that fact, even though I am definitely sporting a bump these days, and the ultrasounds all confirm that the bump contains a very wiggly baby.

During my previous 2 pregancies (or 2.1 pregnancies, if you count the chemical pregnancy of last winter) I practiced positive thinking. This did not get me anywhere, so this time around, I gave myself permission to keep thinking about Plan B. Plan B, as is in, what will I do if this pregnancy does not result in a baby?

DH and I have talked all along about adoption, and about gestational carriers, and even, briefly about egg donors, after a particularly bleak consultation with a doctor in Portland.

We didn't get very far in our discussion about egg donors, but I have kept up in my reading about them, because I understand what it is like for anyone for whom living child-free is not an option. As for gestational carriers, we talked a lot about them. DH was nervous about the whole thing, but I had lost such confidence in my body, that I felt like literally anyone off the street could do a better job of gestation than I could.

Meet the Twiblings is a great article in the New York Times Magazine about one couple's journey to parenthood by using one egg donor and two gestational carriers. I love many things about this article, but today I will share one passage that really struck me about how one might choose a genetic stand-in:

I decided the Fairy Goddonor was the person I would have been had our family stayed in Los Angeles; had my hair stayed blond; had I grown up as a sunny outdoorsy California person instead of a brooding indoorsy East Coast person. And if there are brooding genes I prefer they die with me. She was athletic and played tennis and surfed, as I imagined I would have done, and would still do if only I didn’t suffer from the chronic pain condition that I wouldn’t have if I were her — and wouldn’t then pass on to my children. There was an air of appealing gaiety about her. She seemed reasonably, but not excessively, introspective. She did not seem like someone who stayed up late every night writing in her diary for hours, as I did at her age.

Meanwhile, last night my husband brought home a bottle of sparkling cherry juice, and we wished our wiggling fetus a happy new year. Maybe, for us, positive thinking will make a return appearance. Plan B will still be out there; other people are working out the kinks.