F E AT U R E
Planning, patience and perseverance BY KARLI HANSEN, COLORADO GAMMA
From back left: Kathryn Taylor, Heather Wilson Miller, Renee Richardson Bennett, Pamela Naylon Scandrett, North Carolina Alpha GRACE TAYLOR, Dianelle Meis Amin and Lisa Rede Roman.
If there is one piece of advice I’d want to share with my Pi Phi sisters who may be on this journey, it’s to cherish every moment—even the hard ones. I can still feel the emotions, isolation and ache you might be experiencing. As much as it might be difficult to understand at this moment, there is something you’re learning about yourself. If we take time to listen to our emotions, we have time to learn about ourselves and grow in ways we never thought we could. I don’t know that I’d be the mom I am today if I hadn’t gone through this journey. People will sometimes ask me what it’s like to have “my own child” after adoption. And my response is always: they’re both my children. While conceiving after adoption is quite rare, we were blessed with the miracle of growing our family in both ways. No matter how a child is brought into a family, they are a gift. I feel incredibly grateful to have become a mom through both adoption and childbirth.
In starting our journey to parenthood, my fiancée Erika and I had to first accept some hard truths; our genetics together cannot produce a child. We can’t create a life that is a combination of the two of us, and that’s the reality we’re in. Rather than look at this as a negative, we’ve instead asked ourselves, “What can we control? What can we take ownership of in making our own family?” Our journey to starting a family is unique to us, but the same is true for everyone. This is more complicated than what many others face, but we also know we aren’t alone. So, how did we get here? How did we get to our child, Krosby Pep? Our story began with an Instagram giveaway. A couple we follow online had used a cryobank and was running a promotion for access to this facility’s resources as well as two vials of donor sperm which the winner would choose (as with any other donor process). Amazingly, we won the giveaway and were able to begin the process of selecting a donor sample. The next decision we had to make was who would carry a possible pregnancy. For us, we said whoever had the better probability of conceiving would be the one to do it. Through testing, we determined I had a higher likelihood, and it was most important that we used our best chance to conceive. We got pregnant for the first time in August 2020, and I experienced a missed miscarriage in October. We hadn’t shared widely that we were trying to conceive, but we shared fairly early on that we were expecting because we wanted to celebrate the growth of our family. Because we’d shared the news of the pregnancy, it allowed us to have a network of support and I’m so grateful we did. As we’d been trying to conceive, we’d only let a few close friends and family members know. After our loss, I started having more conversations about how I was feeling and what we were going through, which was a blessing but also had its downsides. So often when we talk about fertility, infertility and pregnancy, people can be well-intentioned while not fully understanding the things they’re saying if they haven’t experienced it firsthand. Erika and I got so many lovely
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