Thoughts on Adoption

If you’ve spent more than a year and a half trying to conceive naturally with no success, why not move on to adoption?  Simple question, right?  Yes…very simple question on the surface.  Simple answer?  Not even close.

Most people who know me also know that I’m an only child.  If you know JPug, you probably know that he’s an only child as well.  How the heck two only children met, fell in love and married is beyond us but it happened and here we are.  I actually can’t think of any other two-only child couples…I’m sure they exist but are rare…if you’re reading this blog…woot woot…here’s a shout out just for you. 

When TeamPug first started talking about a family, we joked that we’d send our son or daughter to kindergarten with a picture of their Family Twig rather than their Family Tree.  Ahhh…gotta love only child humor.  I digress.

Something maybe no one…outside of my parents and JPug…knows is that for three-quarters of my direct lineage, I am the only hope for future generations.  My paternal grandparents had two sons…my father and his brother.  His brother had no children and my father had 1…me.  My maternal grandparents had one child…my mother who had 1 child…me.  My maternal grandmother and her first husband had a son, my uncle and my mother’s half-brother.  For my paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, I am the only person who can continue that blood line in our family.  JPug's family is a bit different in that both of his parents have siblings who have continued their respective blood lines.

I was talking to a friend the other day and mentioned that I look at the potential end as an extinction.  Not on a grand scale, save the pandas sort of way but hopefully you get what I mean.  My family blood line, which can be traced back hundreds of years (thanks to terrific research by my uncle/dad's brother), would be no more.  Would the line continue down the branches of my grandparents siblings…yes…but our direct line would come to an end.

This isn’t something that weighs on my mind constantly but it’s absolutely a consideration in our process.  Having children means so many things to me…one of which is paying homage to those who worked so hard during their lifetime to provide a better life for future generations.  I feel we owe it to ourselves and our ancestors to exhaust all options when it comes to having natural children.  If we’ve done everything in our power to have natural children and the process doesn’t work, then we’ll know we did our absolute best and can move on and consider other options.

Is this line of thinking or the process we’re following right for everyone?  Absolutely not.  As I’ve said before…everyone has their own unique process.  Hopefully this post shed some light on a burning question (just kidding folks)…or at least provided you with another piece of TeamPug’s seemingly enormous puzzle.