everything went great yesterday -- after i stopped crying from fear and then relief i saw the heartbeat which was reassuring. our doc. even said you can tell everyone. HA...and there's the catch: we've spent so many years not telling anyone anything and leading these double lives that it feels really odd to think no more second life that now all of a sudden after not sharing our infertility we will share our fertility. my husband and i agreed to wait until next week after the ultrascreen (non invasive procedure to test for trisome 12, 18 and 21) to make sure that everything really is ok...and then there will be the telling (again assuming all is ok) -- but like i said it seems odd and the words almost stick in my throat. and how do we say them, and when -- right now only my mother and our doctors know. so we will wait till next thursday when the test results come back before saying boo to anyone about this.
then there is the other thing of: do we explain the donor egg idea right from the get go? We want full disclosure for our child, does that mean full disclosure to everyone? to close friends and family? i'm not sure what it means. If anyone has thoughts on this please let me know.
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4 comments:
Congrats! Glad to hear that everything is going well.
Thanks so much for your support on my blog. I really appreciate it!
Hmmm. The mother of DE children once commented that in retrospect, she wished she had not told all and sundry. She said you can always decide to tell at a later date, but you can never untell. I think she feels, as her children grow older, it is their story to tell, not hers. It felt like a big deal when they were very little, but irrelevant as they grew.
Maybe think about those people closest to you that you absolutely want to share this news with and start there? For the rest, you could work up some vague responses to the 'looks just like you' comments ('thank you' or 'I can't see it myself'?) so to be prepared.
We don't feel obliged to tell people our son was IVF, and if we are lucky enough to have a further DE child I don't think I'll tell indiscriminately.
In my opinion, the only person to whom you owe the total truth is your child, but I can see how not sharing with close friends might feel as though you were hiding something.
I'm sure you'll work it out!
Alchemilla
thanks for that thoughtful reply. much appreciated.
Congrats!!! So glad to hear everything is going so well for you.
Disclosure is something I think about a lot. I can't imagine not telling my children how they came to us. I think we will tell them from a very young age. And our families and friends will know as well.
I do think there's a distinction between privacy and secrecy. Just because I believe in full disclosure doesn't mean that everyone has to be told all the time. It really will be my children's story. There will be times they don't want to talk about it and that's fine.
But I never want them to feel any shame about their origins and one of the ways to ensure that is to ensure that I am totally comfortable with it.
But that doesn't mean I want to be the "donor egg mom" or "donor embryo mom" on the playground. I just want to be a mom, you know?
I also feel a responsibility to helping change how people think and talk about donor offspring. How can we expect people to know how common and normal it is if we don't talk about it, at least sometimes?
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