Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [29]
The Clomid didn’t work, so eventually we turned to in vitro fertilization. The cost was $15,000—not covered by insurance—and we were told the success rate was about 15 percent. Lorrie needed to endure shots at 2 A.M. and 2 P.M., and when I was home, I’d give them to her. When I wasn’t home, she gave them to herself.
These were not easy times for Lorrie. “I feel like my body has betrayed me,” she’d say. “My body won’t do the one thing it was designed to do, the one thing that separates one gender from the other.” We’d been raising guide dogs for the blind, and a couple of the dogs were pregnant at the time. “It seems like everyone and every animal I meet is pregnant,” Lorrie would tell me. “Everyone except me.” I knew she felt deeply wounded, but I didn’t fully know how to help her.
I was the one who had to tell Lorrie that the in vitro effort hadn’t worked. She took one look at me and she knew. I had what she later described as a completely flat expression on my face.
I felt devastated for myself, but even more so for Lorrie. All I could say to her was: “Honey, I’m so sorry.” We hugged each other and she cried for a while. I tried to be stoic for her, but I was hurting, too.
We went back to the doctor, who told us we were both still relatively young—I was thirty-nine and Lorrie was thirty-one—and we should consider trying again.
Lorrie had gotten to know another woman who was a patient at the clinic, and on the day Lorrie learned she wasn’t pregnant, that woman was thrilled to learn she was. But then, a few days later, the woman was told that actually her pregnancy hadn’t taken. It was possibly more devastating to have such high hopes dashed. When Lorrie heard this news, she decided she’d had enough.
“What’s our main goal?” she asked me, and then she answered. “Our goal isn’t for me to be pregnant. Our goal is to have a family. And there are other ways we can do that.”
Before she met me, Lorrie had been a longtime Big Brothers Big Sisters volunteer. She saw that as both a duty and a labor of love. She began mentoring her “little sister” when she was twenty-six and the girl was five. Now Lorrie is fifty and her little sister, Sara Diskin, is twenty-nine, and they’re still close. And so when Lorrie was unable to get pregnant, she was able to frame our predicament very clearly. “I’ve known for a long time,” she told me, “that the beauty of a relationship is not biology. I’m ready to move on.”
And so we decided we’d adopt.
Trying to adopt a baby was also an arduous journey—a long, difficult, emotional, expensive roller coaster—and we learned a lot about ourselves in the process.
Lorrie vowed to approach the adoption search as a full-time job. It took effort to educate ourselves about a process that was not well defined. There were many avenues. Which ones would pay off? Lorrie tried to have a business plan, but adoptions don’t always proceed logically.
The fortunes of adoptive parents vary according to the wishes of birth parents. Their names are buried deep on waiting lists, while their files get dissected at agencies by people who don’t really know them. There’s no clear order to the process.
Lorrie was very emotional through all of it, and my attempts at a workmanlike approach didn’t always help. “You don’t know how to console me,” she told me at one point. “It’s outside your parameters. You’re unable to feel things the way I feel them.”
Lorrie struggled with all the paperwork we had to file, and the fact that we had to “qualify” to be adoptive parents. It was hard for her. Throughout her infertility treatments, she was poked and prodded. She had surrendered her body in an effort to find her way to parenthood. She had shown her commitment. Now she was being asked to find friends who’d vouch for whether or not she could handle being a parent. It