Crazy lady...

Anyone else ever think of claiming they got a very faint positive, followed by a bleed, and weren't sure so wanted to go and get it checked out, just to make sure everything's still in place?

Or is it just me?

A post I've been meaning to write for a while, based on something geepeemum said (on her old site). Do we feel the need for others to validate our choices? If we are heading down a given route, do we suggest this to others in order to help us to feel this is the right choice? If they don't choose that route, does it make us feel it's less right, or that they are telling us it's less right?

So of our three or four couples of friends in similar circumstances, one continued to try to get pregnant despite three losses (and are now, what, 25 weeks pregnant?), but stated that adoption would never happen for them mainly because the husband would not accede to the home study/preparation process and the probable requirement for him to be an at-home dad. One is going for ICSI (MF; very negative about adopting from foster care) and one for international adoption, and then there's us - currently still trying but very much in favour of adopting from foster care.

I've had several people say "why aren't you doing IVF" (no point as the success rate is no higher than we currently have either for pregnancy or, hypothetically, for miscarriage); "would you consider donor eggs" (no, mainly because although we've a strong hunch we've no evidence my eggs are genetically cr*p but also because if we're going to have children that aren't related to us genetically we don't mind if they are unrelated to both of us); "why don't you think about adopting from overseas?" (because there's no guarantee we'd get a child who was either younger or less traumatised than one from the UK - sure, some people get lucky, but so do they with UK adoption).

But then I know I do it to others. I try and bring up adoption with the ICSI couple (she works in an inner city primary school and sees the result of some bad foster care arrangements) and the now-pregnant couple. I talk about domestic adoption to the overseas adoption couple (I think they are less concerned than us about children who don't look like they could belong genetically to one or other of us). I think I even asked the overseas adoption couple if they'd considered donor eggs, though to be fair on me as it's not a choice of ours it wasn't a validation question, it was more curiosity and possibly devil's advocate (as they'd probably be asked it in preparation).

The other thing I think we may do is, if a couple has an outcome that is good for them but would be very much second (or last) choice for us, is to feel sorry for them. We don't know if they tried things in chronological order because of the way the world is arranged, not because that's the order of their choices. The overseas adoption couple tried IVF but didn't get beyond the first scan, but for them it was really that if they wanted to try it at any point, they had to do it before adoption, as you can't do them in parallel and after adoption would be too late. I don't get the sense that it was first choice, and adoption was second, at least not after they had realised natural pregnancy wasn't happening. But I've not been privy to many people's decision-making processes in that way.