Many couples turn to adoption to grow their families after losing their battles with infertility. While adoption is a wonderful way to grow a family, it is not a “replacement” for the biological child for which the infertile couple longed.

Adoption Does Not "Cure" Infertility

Adoption cures childlessness, not infertility. Before you are ready to adopt a child, you must grieve your infertility losses. If you do not actively grieve your infertility losses, then you will find yourself still being blindsided with emotional pain as your friends share their joy over being pregnant, even as you hold your adopted child in your arms.

Losses of Infertility

Infertility involves many losses. There are the obvious losses of not experiencing pregnancy, labor, and delivery. In addition to those losses, an infertile couple must grieve the loss of the biological child they wanted. They must accept and grieve that they will never hold that child with daddy’s eyes and mommy’s nose in their arms. Instead, that void will be filled with a child who might not look a thing like either adoptive parent.

Grieving Process for Infertility

Western society does not value the grieving process. People are permitted to cry until a funeral is over, and then they are expected to plug back into their lives. When so little understanding is provided in the death of a family member, the odds of people respecting the need to grieve the loss of a person who never existed are slim. If you wait for society to support you in grieving your infertility losses, you might be waiting a long time.

How to Grieve Infertility Losses

Grieving your infertility losses involves facing them head on. It involves acknowledging that you may never know what it feels like to parent a biological child. Nobody enjoys feeling pain, and most will opt for any alternative to avoid feeling pain. Unfortunately, there is no way to grieve a loss without allowing yourself to experience the pain associated with it. Feeling the pain is the way that you move through the painful place, to a place of acceptance.

Reasons to Grieve Infertility Losses

The purpose of grieving your infertility losses is to reach a place where those losses no longer sting. Grieving involves finding a way to adjust to your new reality and be okay with it. You might always have pockets of grief that bubble up from time to time and ache, but your infertility losses will no longer sting after you have grieved them.

Grieving Infertility While Waiting to Adopt

It is not necessary to wait to adopt a child until after you have fully grieved your infertility losses. The adoption process can take a very long time, so tacking on another year or two to grieve is not going to be appealing to many hopeful adoptive parents. What matters is that you put some energy into grieving the child you wanted to birth so that you have room in your heart to love the child that you’ve adopted.

Finding Peace After Grieiving Infertility Losses

As you let go of your grief, you will come to discover that giving birth to a child or sharing eye color is not what matters. Love knows no boundaries. Love is not limited to someone who shares the same genetics: It is about the heart.

If you choose to grieve your infertility losses, you will be in a better place to embrace your adopted child as your child. You will let go of what you thought a child of yours would be like and, instead, enjoy the beauty and wonder of the child that life brings you.