The Rest of the Story

In case anyone was wondering what happened after the junkie relative's courtroom wedding: the marriage was annulled a few months later. Then she got pregnant with another junkie boyfriend and had the baby, but DSS took him away pretty quickly. They gave him to another relative (her aunt's ex-husband's brother and his wife, to be specific--we're an intimate bunch, in our own twisted way). They wanted to adopt him, but ultimately couldn't, due to their own health issues.

At that point, S and I were a year into our sojourn in the twilight zone of secondary infertility--a realm I never even knew existed until we entered it. When we first decided to have a baby, I got pregnant immediately, had a miscarriage, and then got pregnant immediately with M. When we decided to have another baby, I assumed the same thing would happen, hopefully without the miscarriage. It didn't.

A year later, I was past denial and settled in depression. We were pretty sure that we weren't going to go high-tech with treatments (not that there's anything wrong with high-tech treatments, they just weren't for us at that point), but really we had no plan beyond that. We were a family that desperately wanted another baby and here was a baby who desperately needed a family.

Ultimately (obviously), we decided not to do it. If it had been a year later, I'm quite sure we would have, but at that point we were so confused and depressed and overwhelmed, and we just weren't ready to make the decision to adopt him and forego another biological child (we knew we only wanted two children). That turned out to be a good thing for us, as a year later I did get pregnant, we ended up with E, and a world without E would have been sorely lacking (not just for us, but for all of you, as the general consensus is that she will be the first woman president, unless her sister gets there first).

But I wonder how it turned out for him. There was a nasty divorce and we are no longer in contact with that branch of the family (they were step-family, but at the time that didn't matter). His grandparents adopted him, but I heard recently that his grandmother has lung cancer. I don't know how his mom is. I'm not optimistic about her. But I hope things work out for him.