A Look at Birthmothers, Decision Making, and Denial

It was close to 10 years ago, if not more the first time I was called out on being a birthmother in denial. Max was only 13 and years away from being found and I was new to the adoption community online. I was still saying things like “Adoption was the hardest decision, but the best choice for my baby I could have made. I do not regret it” and expecting to get pats on the back for my selflessness and courage.

Instead I was publically edited, felt mad as a hornet and couldn’t sleep that night. I was told I was unaware of what adoption really was like and that I was in birthmother denial.

How DARE they, I thought, they don’t KNOW me!

Immediately, I started drawing lines in the sand of my mind. Somehow, I had to make this horrible group of angry birthmothers different than me. They were so angry. They had horrible things to say about adoption, so they had to have completely different experiences that I did. We could not be the same.

In a way, I was right. The majority of moms I was speaking to them were older and HAD had very different experiences. They were forced into maternity homes. They KNEW they didn’t want to surrender their children, but they had no choice. They were the mothers from the Baby Scoop Era and, I told myself, adoption had changed. After all, I called my agency. I choose to sign the papers. I got pictures of my baby. I got to hold him when he was born. They treated my kindly. Completely different scenario and so what they said about me could not be true, right?

Wrong.

Choosing Adoption

The problem is that at the core, for the great majority of birthmothers, we don’t WANT to relinquish, but we feel it is the “best” or maybe the only choice. And sometimes it really does seem that way.

Facing an unplanned pregnancy is a lot like being stuck between the rock and the hard place. On one hand, we think about doing what we WANT, i.e. keeping the baby. Then we list the huge list of seemingly insurmountable problems. How to afford everything, where to live, how to work and deal with child care, how to finish school, pay for the doctors, pay for the birth, deal with the baby daddy, hear about it from the family and friends ? Listen, no matter how much our society accepts single motherhood; it’s still seen as a big badge of LOSER to have a child when you are not ready. Then we trot out the list of things that are just WRONG about us; it’s more like the list if insurmountable problems, but now it’s all our own fault … and why we can’t really FIX all of them before this child is born. Tick Tock.

Then, on the other hand, we see adoption. It’s not something we want, but it solves so many of the big issues. Bad baby daddy? Agency social workers will deal with him. Medical bills.. paid for! School and work.. no longer an issue , etc. And then, on top of that.. the baby will now have EVERYTHING. The baby gets a perfect life, the life we don’t have.. and the baby gets a chance to right the wrongs that we got ourselves into because we are dumb and stupid and got into this mess in the first place.

There is a desperation that goes hand in hand with adoption relinquishment. There is a helplessness, of isolation. That is one feeling that ties all birthmothers together: we all were panicked and carried both a baby and a great fear in us. I will state that I see that as a given. I can’t imagine a woman of sound mind and body to desire to give away her baby. Oh, I know they are out there, the truly “horrible mother” story that everyone knows of, but I would caution to say that the percentages of those instances would equal the rates of horrible stories in the general population. It’s something like 2% of the population is a sociopath. That’s memory, not fact. Doesn’t matter. Some of us knew we didn’t want to surrender our children to adoption and some of us think/thought we should relinquish and said that we wanted; bottom line we were all desperate and often betrayed by someone’s trust. No one wants to be a birthmother.

We wouldn’t choose adoption if we did not feel we HAD to. I do believe that about pretty much 99.95% of the birthmothers in the world. We all have our lists of reasons; situational or purely fraught with doubts. It doesn’t matter HOW we all got to this place; some sections of our paths cross connected and the emotional core is the same.

Adoption: One Option =No Choice

There really wasn’t much choice, because if there was, then we wouldn’t “choose” adoption. It’s more like life turns into a giant game of hot potato. You’re at a party, having fun, the music is going, you’re laughing, skipping around, and all of a sudden the music stops and you have to race for a chair. Sometimes that chair happens to be adoption. And you’re stuck in it until the music starts to play again, but it never does.

You know that feeling. I know you do.

Just like you know that deep dark gripping pain that feels as if your heart might truly bust though your stomach and your whole body aches. You can’t breathe and you’re afraid that if you don’t get control you won’t be able to stop. You know the long nights riding the waves of birthmother grief.

We don’t go through this for fun. We do think its selfless and proves that we are strong and selfless and willing to sacrifice our own feelings for the greater good that adoption represents. We ARE convinced that our child will be better off, happier, more well adjusted and never wanting with the adoptive parents. We HAVE to believe this, or the alternative is too much to bear; we willfully let our children be taken away from us.

That goes against every natural instinct we have ever been taught.

The Culture of Adoption

Mothers are suppose to fight to the death for our children. The adoption industry can try to spin it however they like, saying a “birthmother is a good mother” , but does this feel right?

After working through their fears and conflicts, birthmothers choose adoption because they believe that it is best for their children. They realize that adoption is not abandonment; it is a loving, responsible act. By choosing what is best for their children, birthmothers see themselves as good mothers. Instead of feeling like bad mothers for abandoning children or “giving them away,” they now begin to see that placing their children with loving couples is what it means for them to be good mothers. They redeem themselves, transforming their mistakes into positive outcomes. Adoption allows them to recover their self-esteem, restore their identity, and renew their dreams and goals.

Yeah, that’s a problem. It’s not a good thing to come up with a program where girls who feel “bad”‘ can redeem themselves and become “good” by giving away their babies to other people who pay upwards of 30K for the pleasure of their paperwork.

(You know the NCFA is federally funded right? Just checking)

In adoption land, and especially once one gets within what I call the “bosom of the agency”, the highly unnatural act of leaving one’s child becomes and act of grace. What would be abandonment anywhere else becomes a loving gesture.

Yet, if we don’t continue to believe in the lies, then the walls might truly come tumbling down. And that is scary. There is so much the walls hold back. To face the truth and the depth of the loss is like facing the deepest back whole of your soul and I think we all fear getting lost in there. I know I try to avoid truly feeling it. Just because I know it’s there doesn’t make it healthy denial or does it?

Birthmother Denial = Survival

A human being cannot walk around in life constantly wounded. A birthmother cannot function while touching the deep emotional core all the time. And so, we find ways to shield our wounds. We bury the pain or we fight to control it.

Those gentle words and pats on the back from the agency were like salve on my wounds. When I was newly birthmothered , returned home after the adoption, still deeply sobbing alone at night; I would take out all those trite agency sayings and try to console myself with them. Being a birthmother become my new identity: I WAS strong, I WAS selfless, I WAS good.

I don’t have to wonder why so many new birthmothers delight in being asked by their agency to speak to some group sat some school someplace. It’s all so new that she has to be told over and over again how wonderful she is. When the other choice is that deep dark place, it’s still a rock and a hard place. I would have chosen the speaking gigs too. I would have been thrilled. I remember, my agency asked me to fill out some survey about the relinquishment experience. I think it was for a study. I felt honored they would ask. Yeah, that’s how insidious it was.

You don’t know how thankful I am that there were no blogs back in 1988. There is no public record of how full of Adoption Kool-Aid I was, just what I care to admit. I really did think adoption was the cat’s meow. It wasn’t that I was in some deep denial that adoption wasn’t the huge billion dollar generating unregulated industry that I know it to be, but that I really had no idea that there was anything BAD about adoption, except that it hurt. And the hurt was for GOOD, so it was a good hurt or some such malarkey. Besides, I was the only one hurting and really, I didn’t matter.

In that way, it is a denial of our self worth.

Oh, and almost everything I was taught about adoption from the agency was kind of wrong; so all these new thoughts on adoption just made my mind explode. I stopped feeling indignant and just started listening. That’s a good cure for denial.

I stopped making everyone different than what I was in my head . I stopped saying “You don’t know me!” and started to get to know them, especially the ones that made me feel the maddest.

That was one of the best decisions I could have made.