I am facing a new reality, blogging is different for me today than it was six months ago.

I used to focus solely on our recurrent pregnancy loss struggles. This meant I wrote about:

• Emotions behind losing babies and losing dreams.
• Emotions surrounding getting pregnant again after loss.
• Challenges of navigating a medical system that seems to know nothing about recurrent miscarriage.
• Having substantial fears related to experiencing another loss.
• What it means to be a mother to children that no-one else acknowledges.
• How to deal with changing friendships and life priorities.
• How to actually have a miscarriage.
• My experiences with different types of miscarriages.

There are common threads between adoption and infertility, like maintain a marriage through highly stressful times; changing my priorities in life and learning to work to live not live to work; accepting that life is messy and learning to live in the mess; etc. There are things unrelated to either of these paths that I will continue to write about, like my family, the death of my mom and sister, my dog, our newest project or latest travel adventure. These things continue to be part of my story, and so I will continue to share.

But now that my life and therefore my writing includes adoption I feel the need to think through what I’m writing in a new way. I feel the need to censor myself a bit more. We have found this happening in our real lives too. The reason for this is twofold.

Frist, I need to be sure that what I say is respectful of our future children. While this was the case while we were going through RPL, it doesn’t feel the same now that we are talking about adoption. Its one thing for me to be upset with my body for not doing what it’s supposed to, but it’s a whole different thing for me to speak negatively about someone else in my child’s life. So, thinking about this hypothetically, things like birth mother details will always be confidential between Mr. MPB, myself and our child.   While we may not like everything, we need to be respectful of our child’s biological family and give them the opportunity to shape their own opinions.

Second, my future child’s personal details are not public. It is one thing for me to share with the world my reproductive issues, but it is not fair for me to share my child’s medical history and life story. It is my child’s right to their own privacy and it should be their decision to tell their personal story when and how they want to. I’m learning not to share everything, and this is new and hard for me. I’m a story teller. I’m a talker and a writer. But, I realize the importance of being more selective in what I reveal as it pertains to our child. For example, I spoke a lot about our struggles to decide what to choose for race and substance exposure, but I never revealed what we chose. This was done purely for our child’s sake, as we want to be able to talk to them about these decisions ourselves when the time is right. We made the decision that we will never tell anyone in our real lives or my blogging life about our exact selections.

So, while I may not share about the outcome of our decisions, I will continue to do my best to be open and transparent about our adoption journey. I plan to continue to share about things like the adoption process; grieving my lost infertility; how we make hard decisions including the different factors we consider; my emotional turmoil though the process including my frustration and my moments of despair and doubt; and, my deep connection and reliance on hope.

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