In my last post, Fertility Success Stories, I shared several fertility success stories experienced by people in my life. All of these people were blessed to hold their biological children in their arms after struggling to conceive them. However, those are not the only successful stories shared by people in my life. I would be remiss if I left out one of my favorite success stories, which is different from the others.

I want to send out a special thank you to this friend for allowing me to share her story. After I wrote an initial draft of this post, she chose to add several personal details that drive home how inspiring her story is. I appreciate her honesty in sharing her struggles.

I met my friend, L, when I formed an infertility/waiting to adopt support group through my church. By this time in my life, I was a mother to my then-two-year-old son through adoption, and I was on the wait list to adopt a second time. L reminded me so much of myself when I met her because she was so determined to "make" a baby with her husband. If sheer determination could have forced her to conceive, she would have conceived quadruplets in the first month.

Unlike me, who was always open to adoption as an option, L had no interest whatsoever in the "A" word. While she respected my choice to adopt and thought my son was precious, adoption was not for her. She had fantasized about getting pregnant, carrying a child for nine months, delivering a baby, and sharing the experience with her husband.

Because L's best friend from childhood was adopted, adoption was close to her heart, and L knew, even in her twenties, that adoption was something that she wanted to do someday. However, this was not the time. Her husband had been married before and had a daughter by his first wife. It hurt L to think her husband could share this experience with his ex-wife but not with her.

L's husband had surgery to reverse a vasectomy. L did several rounds of Clomid while her husband took one 25 mg tablet every day for a year. (This was the first time I learned that men were sometimes prescribed Clomid, too. I cannot imagine two people on Clomid living under one roof.)

They did seven rounds of intrauterine inseminations (IUIs). In the middle of all of this, another support group member got pregnant after one IUI. It was so heartbreaking to watch L's struggles to become a mother.

After a year of willing herself to become pregnant, L started to accept the reality that her body might never cooperate. She very reluctantly took me up on an offer to meet some of my on-line adoptive mother friends to learn a little bit about the "A" word. She understood what I meant about the difference between striving to get pregnant versus striving to be a mom after she met other adoptive mothers. I will not go into the details of her experiences with trying to adopt, but suffice it to say that she made my experience look like a walk in the park.

Today, L is the proud mother of a toddler through adoption who is the joy of her life. L is now one of the strongest proponents for adoption that I have ever met. She agrees wholeheartedly that families form in different ways and that one way is not "better" than another.

L had to reach this place in her own way and in her own time, but she did reach it. She is now a mother, even if it was not in the way that she originally planned. She would not change a thing because her path led her to being this child's mother, and he is a very precious blessing.

Related Topics:

• Adoption After Infertility
• The Infertility Treadmill
• What Infertile People Find Scary About Adoption