[judijo]

Scrobin, I am sorry you are so down on yourself and your uterus, but oh, my gosh...there is so much more to life than fertility!

I reckon you are young (under 25). If I am wrong, I apologize profusely. I think as you mature (either with age or with weight loss, if that be in your "cards") you will encounter people who find satisfaction in life without children, or in the very noble act of raising children other than their own (i.e. adoption, step children). Also, when the time comes and you and a loving mate are ready to talk family, very competent doctors are out there to help you in your solutions of working with medications and all. I have a very good friend who has chronic depression issues and she was able to be medicated throughout her pregnancy. The only caveat was she could not breast feed the baby.

Our society is very hung up on wanting their own everything. The mature people in life are the ones who accept the concept of responsibility of life, regardless of it's source.

I pray (really, I do) that you find serenity soon.

PS. I am VERY ADD and have raised two children. One is borderline (who is learning coping mechanisms with me) and one is not at all.

[Lovie]

I think you might be looking for an ear to listen to you and some feed back so here you go...
I feel very bad that you feel you can't have children. I have a feeling there might be more going on then ADD and depression. I have both - treat them with medication - and have two healthy happy children. My daughter who is 16 suffers from anxiety but she has our support and we work through it with love and meds. It is nothing severe however. I am married to a man that is 12 years younger than me and I had my tubes tied when I met him. It had no bearing on how he loved/loves me or wheather he wanted to be with me. If someone loves you they love you and that's all there is to it.

[Christy0283]

I'm sorry you are having such a hard time, but first of all, I know that it is possible to have children and them not inherit ADD or depression.

And, as others have said, there are several things you can do. I agree with the fact that you don't have to birth a child to be his/her mother.

I wish you the best no matter what you decide. Keep us posted.

[amina6ae]

So Sorry About The Feelings You Are Feeling......
I Think You Need To Get A 2nd Opinion.
With Add & Depression, I Wouldn"t Be Concerned As Much As You Seem To Be...

Prayers For You Are Being Sent.
God Has A Plan For You As He Has A Plan For Us All...
Please Don"t Forget That>>>

Lol,

[reastland]

Scrobin,
I am raising my nephew (a meth baby with severe ADHD). I am a teacher, and he is doing well using the classroom stratiegies that I've learned over the years. We use visual calandars, reward system, medication and an alternat educational setting. This term he got two B's and two C's for his report card.
He had been raised the previous five years by another aunt (my other sister with her two girls)--he came to me because he needed more 1 on 1 and they had 4 total children, and he was constantly taking all of their time.
His mother is now clean and sober--one day at a time. When I talked with her, she shared that he was a meth baby, but his older sister had been a cocain baby. Noise of any kind upset her, and she startled and shook for the first year she was alive.
Both children experienced violence during their early years.
Two weeks ago we went to her high school graduation--she graduated with honors and several scholarships. She is an outstanding person--a sensitive caring woman, a thoughtful writer, a beautiful person inside and out, who will attend college next year as well.

The point of sharing these two amazing stories is that your children will NEVER be like you, because even with your conditions--they will be raised by you! They will share your traits, but with today's knowledge, you can raise them to be thougtful productive people. What a gift they will have in you. They will be raised differently, if they have mood disorders etc., you will be there to support them and teach them how to become productive citizens.

I never wanted to have children because they would have the fat genes, and I didn't want a child of mine to have the same experiences I had, yet here I am rasing a child--and my obesity issues make him a more sensitive and caring boy/man. He will not laugh or put people down--because he knows the struggles of being different.

The question is, are you ready emotionally to be a mom? Have you done the work it will take to support a child if they do have your issues? If possible, try to reframe this issue, and live in the moment. Getting married and having children is a long way off from being stable and living one day at a time to take care of yourself. If you are able, relax and focus on today--tomorrow's troubles come soon enough.

Good Luck and Blessings as you sort through this time,
Becky

[scrobin]

I already got a second opinion. My doctors are very well respected. My family physician is even a friend of the family, and would not tell me it's unadvisable unless there was a good reeason.The doctors say, my chances of passing on my genes is a fifty-fifty shot providing the father doesn't have the same genes I do.

[reastland]

I'm so sorry for your loss. Please ignore any of my e-mail that didn't hit the mark. My prayers are with you during this tough time.

Becky

[clancythecamper]

It sounds like you're really dealing with some tough issues. We don't get to choose our battles in life, they just get handed to us and some of them really hurt. Will say a prayer for you ~ I would encourage you to continue to work through the emotional aspects to seek healing there. There's no way to know what good things are coming your way but I trust they are coming ~ wishing you all the best.

[mommytoj&k]

I got married later in life and ended up having to have a hysterectomy after about a year and a half after I got married. I was devastated that I would not be able to have kids of my own. I grieved as if I had actually lost a child. In a sense, I fully understand your hurt and pain. During my time I sought to understand 'why me?' especially since I had waited so long to get married. It was a real struggle for me at the time and I cried for several months over this.

Then about a year after the surgery, God saw fit to put two beautiful children in our lives. We adopted two siblings who were 6 & 8 at the time. They are now 10 and almost 40 . At times I forget that I did not birth them!! They are every bit my children. Both have ADHD (diagnosed after we adopted them) and my son suffers from self-esteem issues. It is a LOT of work, but I take pride in the fact that they are so much better off than they would have been 'in the system'.

Most women want biological children of their own. I am sorry if this is not going to be for you. It wasn't for me either. This is a season that you are going through. Do know that it will get better, it will just take some time. I still wonder 'what if' sometimes, but it is not something that I dwell on any longer. If you are a believer pray and ask for God's help. I will be praying for you.

Take care.

[DocSanae]

I’m going to be straightforward here, and it is going to be long, and may sound harsh in some respects.
I am sorry that you feel that way about yourself, but I agree with genmel, SunflowerGirl, da perfesser, OMCV, judijo, lovie, reastland, mommietoj&k and others, and am going to add my own thoughts here.

The first thing that makes me wonder is what your definition of a true woman is. At your age, I know it may center around physical perfection—including how you look, and your ability of reproduction. As you grow older (I am older than da perfesser, btw, so I know what I’m talking about), it will change, and you will come to realize, it’s more than the physical aspects. It’s about who you are, what you are, what you are willing to accept, what you are willing to give. What choices you make, and how you make them. It is about learning about yourself, and working with what you have and make the best of them, and not dwell on what you don’t’ have. Granted, this will take time. Some people will make the transition easily, others will cry over what they cannot have. However, nobody’s perfect, and there’s no such thing as a *perfect* life. There are many many *good* lives, though, because the person living it knows how to be happy with him/herself. Happiness is is happiness does. You’re the one who decides your mileage, you’re the only one who can decide and are responsible for your mileage, and your mileage will be not be the same as others.

If you want children, you can, in one way or another. You can have biological children, from reading your post, your drs didn’t tell you that you couldn’t have them, just that there is a 50-50 chance of passing on something to them. No dr will tell you not to have children, unless it is life-threatening to you in a very physical way, like having heart defect that pregnancy would put a strain strong enough as to be a threat to your life, or a defect of your womb that would endanger both your life and your pregnancy. ADD and depression don’t fit into that category, it is treatable and controllable with medication. I do no think your drs will ever say you can’t have children. They may say the pregnancy and nurturing a child will be a strain on your mental health, but they have the tools to help you, if you will let them, so if you decide to have a child, they won’t tell you not to, but they will support you to the best of their abilities.

You say that you are not willing to bring to this world a child with debilitating illness, but are these conditions debilitating? Granted, if the child does turn out to have ADD and/or depression, he/she will need medical attention, but being aware of the possibility already puts that child in a place for being able to have a good life. Besides, medical knowledge and medication has improved greatly over the past few decades. The child will have more knowledge and medication to help him/her along, than you did when you were born. That means your child will have a better chance than you had in your younger years for leading a *normal* life.

If you’ve *decided* that you can’t have children because your issues are genetic, and then go on to lament the fact that you can’t have children, and so are lacking as a woman, and that men will not desire you, then I think you’ve built your own cage that you won’t be able to break out of, because you are stuck in your thoughts. I know it sounds harsh, but you yourself are the culprit who’s robbing you of your *womanhood* as you call it.

As da perfesser says, it’s who you are, that will attract the *right* kind of men. Unless you can first love who you are, you will not be able to truly love someone else, not even your children, and no one else can love you either. Learn to be secure in who you are right at this moment, and work to enrich your character and knowledge, the person you are. You do not need *perfection* to be secure. If you are sure of your self worth, you can be secure with that. If you feel you are lacking in something, and lament for it, it will show no matter how well you hide it to those who are very instinctive in seeing other peoples’ insecurities. While some of these kinds of people are good people, there are those who will zoom in, target and exploit such insecurities.

Something else. When I was school age, ADD/ADHD weren’t taken notice of, the way they are now. Sure, there were some kids who had a rather short attention span, but nobody really seemed to think that special. You were a kid, curious about a heck of a lot of things, so, sure, some kids’ attention would wander from one thing to another. Teachers and parents were patient enough to help the kid and wait on them to grow out of it. I don’t think such kids from my generation are doing that badly in life.
Much the same with depression. You do know that Abraham Lincoln suffered from depression, don't you? Yet, he functioned well enough as President of the US, and during the difficult years of the Civil War (to the Southerners, I believe it's the War with the North ) at that.


So you see, most of the things in our lives, the issues we have, the issues we think we have, are relative. The seriousness of them are relative to how we perceive them. If your outlook in life changes, they will change. Things that seemed important will become minute compared to something else that comes up later on. Or vice versa. Nothing in life is immobile, it is flowing and there’s continuity. How we wade through that, is what makes us and defines us. Do not build your own cage, you have the keys to the doors, so open them, and keep them open.