My story is the same as so many others. I never really thought about children until I was in my late 30s, and then my husband and I began the simple task of getting pregnant.  

Only it wasn't so simple.  

The next thing you know we're being referred to an infertility clinic where I fill countless vials with my blood, where my insides are poked and prodded and filmed from all angles, and where, ultimately, I undergo surgery to remove my right ovary (dermoid cyst, they say) and several fibroids—after which I'm told I have 0% chance of ever getting pregnant.  

I weep. I wail. I run-do-not-walk to my therapist.

But I don't give up. 

I try alternative measures, the so-called "complementary" medicine. I go to acupuncturists, get embedded with needles from my scalp to my toes, drink murky Chinese herbal teas, take droplets of bitter tinctures, and get my meridians heated up with moxibustion. (I'd not heard of it either). 

Nothing works. 

I get depressed. Frustrated. Angry.  

Then I get bitter. All my life I’ve felt capable of doing pretty much anything I put my mind to: Get into the college I want, get the job I want, get the boyfriend I want. Get my poems and stories published, win prizes and residencies.

Not that any of these things were easy—far from it—but I’ve never been afraid to dream big or to work hard to realize those dreams. Or maybe it was sheer luck. In any case, I'd somehow acquired a positive attitude when it came to my own potentialities.

But now, here was something I was never, never ever, going to be able to do. Get pregnant, bear my own child, pass my DNA on to the next generation.

Not that the biological aspect of parenthood was my foremost objective. Although, as I get older, I’m weirdly fascinated at how my jowls are coming to resemble my father’s jowls, how I’m picking the same cracked skin off my heels the way I remember my mother picking at her own dry soles. Kinship, I admit, was deeply appealing to me—having a genetic legacy, “blood is thicker than water” and all that business.

But as time (and depression) passed, I got over it.

I could finally see that there was another legacy I wanted to leave. A legacy of (and I know how cornball this is going to sound) love and nurturing and sharing. It occurred to me that my genes weren’t all I had to give; that, in fact, they might represent the least of what I could offer. (Anyone who’s had a tough childhood can tell you that DNA alone does not a happy family make, that genes are a terribly poor substitute for affection, support, encouragement, patience, gentleness, or time.)

I slowly began to stop obsessing on loss and turned my attention toward what I had to gain. The chance to give—to give the best of myself to another human being, to mentor and guide a child through the maelstrom that is life, to do, in short, all the things I wish had been done for me—these are the things I’m hoping for now. And I’ve just come to realize that adoption is a path to attaining that dream.

So, I've finally reached the trailhead. It's a beautiful day. Here we go...

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