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Once upon a time, there was a woman who wanted to be a mother more than anything. But she never found the right man and had no luck with the scientific alternatives. Finally, she decided to adopt despite the overwhelming odds of being single, a minority, having limited resources and family who tried to talk her out of taking this step at 48 years old. We call this woman "Meno Mom" and she is my younger sister.
Meno Mom is one of a growing number of women in midlife who have 17 minutes left on their biological clock but aren't willing to miss out on the experience of motherhood. Getting pregnant versus adoption is one of the initial hurdles. Liz over at Inventing My Life , who's doing a special series on her midlife adoption journey at Midlifebloggers realized:
There are no guarantees in life about anything. Especially given my age, there were all sorts of risks involved with trying to get pregnant. I started to think it was a miracle that any healthy and intelligent babies are born at all! Not to mention the fact that my “pretty good genes” would only be half of the genetic material. I began to realize that ending up with a child who didn’t get a perfect score on the SATs was not the worst thing that could happen. And given a choice between an uncertain outcome from a bunch of icky medical procedures and a slightly less uncertain outcome from a long and expensive but not physically icky process, I chose adoption.
Like Meno Mom and Liz, would-be midlife mommies are looking at motherhood from a different perspective than in their younger years when adoption probably wouldn't have been a consideration. Now they want the quickest and shortest path to their goal.
I watched Meno Mom move full steam ahead in the adoption process with a to-do list that seemed (at least to me) to stretch for miles. And as she did adoption prep, Meno Mom also handled a significant share of the care-giving for our mother who has dementia. We had a caregiver during the day, but evening duty was done by my sister who lived the closest. I don't think either one of us realized that Meno Mom was in dress rehearsal for her new role as a member of the sandwich generation.
Sandra who writes on older parent adoption issues at Adoption Blogs describes the "sandwichers":
Older adoptive parents; you know the ones -- little kids on one side, aging parents on the other, you in the middle trying to see to it that both are cared for properly, have all the attention they need, their medical issues attended to, their futures as bright and healthy as possible.
Although she did handle the ups and down of the adoption process well, Meno Mom did hit a roadblock. Because she was adopting domestically where the birth mother picks the new parent, the agency asked Meno Mom to create a scrapbook with photos and stories about her and our family.
Meno Mom froze. Even though she's a gifted artist, this "pick-me, pick-me" step made her feel like she was in some kind of beauty contest she couldn't win. Her confidence sank and her dream started to unravel. Liz over at Inventing My Life talks about this uncomfortable phase of the adoption process as well as anyone:
Here are the many ways that I have been thinking that other people are better than me, especially in terms of being ready to adopt:
- Other people have more money than I do
- Other people have husbands
- Other people live in better houses than I do
- Other people live in better neighborhoods than I do
- Other people have more friends than I do
- Other people have better jobs than I do
- Other people are more politically active than I am
- Other people have cooler stuff on their blogs than I do
Up until now, I was pretty much a casual bystander as Meno Mom jumped the adoption hurdles. But when she became deflated and unsure as she compared herself to "other people", I stepped in with some advice that came to me out of the clear blue:
You have to put it out into the Universe that your baby is waiting for you. The only thing standing in the way is the scrapbook. So change your thoughts, manifest your daughter and let's work together to get this book done!
Now I didn't know anything then about the law of attraction or "manifesting" your dreams. But intuitively I did know that my niece was out there waiting. So stepping out on faith, my sister and I visited scrapbook stores over the next three weeks and sorted through old family photos. We even bought gifts for the baby -- Meno Mom bought little shoes and I bought a pink onesie with some saying about cute aunties.
Finally Meno Mom
