Hypothetical Future Baby

I've been reading this fabulous book I picked up from Book Depository, and some of the writing is like it came straight from my head. The book is called Hypothetical Future Baby by Claudia Chapman

It's one of the few books where I have dog-eared pages to go back and re-read because they resonated with me so strongly. I've included a couple of lines, but I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in learning more about the topic.

On adoption after infertility:

This couldn't be any less like having a baby the usual way.... I know it's a very specific, Western, middle-class experience of pregnancy that I am craving... I have been surprised by how much it hurts not to be part of the collective female experience of giving birth to the next generation. p48

On adoption not being a replacement for doing things 'the normal way':

I feel intense joy about the family that we are going to have, but I still find myself mourning the losses of what we won't have too, what we won't be, what I can't do. I expect our child will feel the same. However joyful our lives are together, he should never have had to feel the loss of one set of parents before gaining a second. p49

My Mum recently said to me that she was worried about how I am going to cope when we have a baby after we have built up all of these expectations. The book expands on that:

...the fact that I will  have waited so long for this child, and I really hope he or she will change my life for the better, but the consensus seems to be that parenthood involves a lot of hard work and sleepless nights and is not just about cashmere blankets and sunny days... At the moment I just can't reconcile that knowledge with my intense longing to finally meet my child, and the heartache that I don't even know when that will be. p89

The problem with adopting is that the process is so awful, you convince yourself the end must be really amazing to make up for it. But then when you get there, I suppose that parenting is just going to be really ordinary.  p119

So much of what Claudia wrote was on the mark, even though her experience was inter-country adoption from the UK. It's always helpfulto read others experiences and help me to plan and work out how we can be the best parents possible to our own 'hypothetical future baby'.