I've been thinking for a long time that having a plan B would be a good idea. I think there is a lot to be said for knowing that if the course you are currently on fails, that there is another course you can take that may get you to a similar goal. I, however, have never been much good at Plan Bs. I am always very, very clear what 'good' looks like, and very, very, disappointed when I don't get it. For me it's been a sequence rather than simply having a back-up plan.
For example, aged 17 I applied for early entry to one of the two top UK universities. Let's call it CU. I'd known since I was about 5 years old that I needed to go to this university, because that's where my father, and all my uncles, and my grandfather, and so on, had gone. I knew which university, and which college. (NB for the rest of this post, 'college' means one of the subsidiary institutions of CU - all offer the same course, it's where you live and where you socialise, and provides some of your academic tutoring but not lectures).
I hadn't, however, wanted to do early entry as this was famously hard work, and detracted from my newly burgeoning social life. But my mother really, really wanted me to do early entry as she decided that otherwise I'd be too old to enjoy university. This was perhaps due to a little residual parental guilt from having refused to have me skip a year earlier in my school career. But mostly it was because she wanted me to meet my future husband, and she was worried that he wouldn't want me if I was older than him. Of course she was ignoring the fact that I was chronically shy and about 15 pounds overweight meaning that no man of my dreams was going to even notice I was AT the university, but never mind. She was determined, so she argued with my school, and with me, until we gave in. Did I mention that they abandoned early entry the year after I applied as it was universally accepted as being (i) too stressful and (ii) madly discriminatory against state school applicants? Never mind, there I was, booked in to do it.
So how did I handle this situation of advanced stress and hard work? I shirked, ladies, I shirked. I used the excuse of extra work for the entrance exam to not even do my work for my regular classes. I read fiction late into the night, except when sometimes I got interested in evolution and then I read about that. But the extra chemistry and maths? No sir, no way. It was my own little teenage rebellion against my mother. And then I came to sit the exam and I sat there for most of the time not knowing what to do with myself as I didn't even understand many of the questions. Not surprisingly, three weeks later, a few days after Christmas, I was turned down. Not even good enough to go into the pool of applicants that other colleges can pick from if they are desparate. I needed to get Alphas and Betas to have a chance, I got deltas for everything except biology, where I scraped a beta minus.
I was devastated. I cried for days - despite the fact that I'd effectively sabotaged myself. Everyone was very surprised that I didn't get in as I was supposed to be this academic rock star. I recovered slowly, and by the early Spring I was ready to think about applying again. I wrote to a few colleges - not my father's alma mater but a selection that looked interesting to me - and chose which college to apply to based on which college indicated they'd let me in without retaking the exam the following autumn. I then got stupendously good results in my school leaving exams, and was invited for interview at my chosen college in late September - in the meantime I'd had to return to school for 'seventh term' and start preparing to take the exam again in late November just in case the interview route didn't work. Two weeks later my chosen college called to say they'd be delighted to offer me a place. Phew.
Without knowing it, I'd taken a second route to get to where I wanted to be. Not the original place I wanted to be, but one that actually turned out to be better. My father's college was huge and pretty snooty. I went to the college that was half the size next door, and in my first term was placed on a corridor of six rooms. The occupants of three of the other rooms have become my closest friends. I regularly thank my lucky stars that I failed the first time and got my second chance. Not a plan B. I hadn't thought hard enough about plan A to know what I'd do if it failed.
Despite how I felt when I didn't get into CU the first time, I've never in my life wanted anything like I want to be a mother. I'm terrified of the level of disappointment I will feel when we finally figure out that IVF will not work for us. People have asked us about surrogacy but I don't even know where to begin with that. So I have decided to research adoption. I need that plan B, and I need it to be a real plan now, not something we pursue later because we have no choice. I want to look into it before it becomes our last chance. I feel that it deserves more than to be our final choice.
So I've re-read many of Manuela's posts, and read with alacrity the discussion over at her place last week about the ethics of adopting from China. I've read the UK adoption services' brochure, and a book about adopting from China to the UK, called "From China with Love". It's not a great book, the writing is a bit dodgy sometimes, but it's a very heartfelt and, importantly for me, informative story about what it takes to adopt from the UK. International adoption is not nearly as well supported here as it is in the US, and the british social workers are NOT in general supportive. According to the official literature, we should be open to adopting school age children who either have disabilities or who have had a troubled care situation. In the UK social services' focus is on reuniting babies with their familes, and so small children will stay in foster care until it's really really clear that they will not be able to go back to their families - i.e., long after they are babies. Equally, H and I, as a white couple, would not be eligible to adopt many of the children who end up in care, let alone the babies.
I just can't get my head round those restrictions yet. They are very anti international adoption as they feel it exacerbates the abandonment issues that all adopted children have at some stage. But I feel that that is the right option for us. I do want to parent a very young child, and we won't have any chance to do that with local adoption. And I do believe what I wrote at Manuela's last week, if there is a baby girl in China who has no chance of being adopted there, isn't it better that we adopt her and love her than that she stays in that orphanage? I know that's really self-serving, so am I just trying to justify my feelings?
The other reason that I think that China is right for us is that H speaks Chinese, which would go a long way towards making our application acceptable to UK social services. It would also, I hope, help us to do whatever our daughter needs to connect with her country and with her previous culture. The bad side is that H really wants a son. And obviously our son could not come to us from China. H is not even ready to really discuss this yet, but he did read the social services booklet, and From China with Love is on his nightstand. He will get there, if that's where we need to go.
I'm feeling ambivalent about this research. First it sent me into a huge tailspin of despair about where we were in the process. Now it's helping me feel that we have possibilities. No doubt tomorrow I will be somewhere different. But for now, I'm happy to have a plan B.
We had a lovely weekend. Weather wasn't wonderful but it was good enough to walk around the town all day. We ate some good food, we stayed in a wonderful hotel, we were enlightened in a cultural manner, and we bought a carpet. It was a great way to spend H's birthday weekend. So I don't feel too guilty that on his actual birthday this morning we had to get up at 6am in that timezone, 4am in the UK, and it's now 8pm and I'm not home yet. 
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