Sometimes you walk straight into a left hook. Life just punches you right in the face. I belong to a twin moms’ group on Facebook. There are lots of great tips on dealing with newborn and toddler twins–little clever tips and tricks that I love to learn about. But there are also two kinds of twin moms in the world: those who are superfertile, who seem to get pregnant by walking past a man (e.g., my sister), and, well, those who are like me. Years-in-the-making, on-your-knees-praying, twin moms. This day my Facebook newsfeed was full of not one, but TWO of the first kind of twin moms who were freaking out because they had very young twins and just found out they were pregnant again.
Their reactions and my reaction to this news was probably not that dissimilar. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Their posts went on to express dismay and concern over this news. Now, I don’t know them. I don’t know if their husbands just lost their jobs, if their babies are colicky. There are worlds that I don’t know, and they are entitled to feel how they feel. It’s their life. I do know that I’m thrilled with this adoption and it feels 100% right. But it didn’t stop my knee-jerk reaction: “Why couldn’t it have been me?”
We haven’t used birth control in six years. There are no miracle pregnancies on the horizon for us. My body simply doesn’t work that way. But it’s always impossible to quash that last little bit of hope that someday, it would work as it should. That I would be able to do something that “comes naturally.”
My husband and I have agreed that if this adoption is successful, we are done. Our family is complete. But I can see that I will still have some healing to do over the fact that I wasn’t able to get pregnant on my own, that my body seemed to betray me and tried to kill my children. Sometimes I’m angry at the weird little things they found in my blood that seem to cause it all: the infertility, the miscarriages, the liver damage. I get jealous when I hear news like those mothers’, but that doesn’t change how I feel about this adoption. We’re in 100%. The only questions that mattered when we got that text was, “Can we love this baby? Are we willing to make it our own?” My answer remains unchanged, as does my husband’s. I may get jealous or feel wistful when I see news like this, but I’ve found my own miracle. And he’ll be here soon.
Cancer Ever After 
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