We all worry. We all fear so much that we will lose what precious little we have managed to obtain, that we are frozen solid in fear. Adoptees, birthmother, fathers, siblings.. all dancing to a song that we don’t known the melody to but desperately tying to sing along hoping we don’t step on another’s toes.
Maybe you or she or even some well meaning friends might suggest that your daughter relinquish this baby to adoption and this will, no matter what you might have been lead to believe or what you might read in most publications, will NOT allow her to continue life as planned. By encouraging or supporting your daughter to relinquish her baby to adoption you are, in a most literally, sense helping to destroy the child you now know as your daughter.
I’ve learned to be gentle with my younger self. I really didn’t stand a chance up against that agency. They are very good at their business. They know exactly what to say and withhold. I was a prime, easy target for them and they did not hold back. They pounced and turned the knife to the very end.
I feel COMPLETELY different when it comes to adoption. With abortion, I trust a women to know what she wants and exercise her right to make an informed choice. With adoption, I feel like she has no clue, cannot know what she wants and is not making an informed choice. This has plagued me. Why are my feelings different?
The intent behind “protecting” a person from the ugly or not so ugly truth about one’s self might be begun as a kindness, but it is still a lie. So even if you love the person you wish to protect, you are betraying their trust and making a decisions for them based on your feelings, not theirs. You are not trusting them enough with knowledge that is theirs, not yours, to withhold. Truth is truth and no amount of wishing can change that.
Your strong-arming and personal desires created a statistic out of us, a punch line, a stereotype and titles that we will forever be known as….a birth mom…a birth child, now YOU want a relationship with MY son.
There is a good chance that motherhood will never be the same for a birthmother. Even under completely different circumstance than the adoption, years later, the mother we could have been has been altered. She is gone. What is left is a new mother, a new persons, one forever altered by the relinquishment experience.
We make it out the double glass doors and I burst into hysterical tears. Not weeping, not crying, but gut wrenching hysterical deep soul crushing sobs. Rye looks at me shocked, I am beyond all logic. I make it about ten steps to the car, and then turn around….sobbing, tears flowing down my face, I am not sure what I said. It was like I had stepped on an emotional land mind and now all this shrapnel of myself was just flying.
I had no way of knowing it, but when I had to leave my “baby” cat behind and walk out that door without turning back..I hit that place that every relinquishing mother fears. It really was an emotional land mind that exploded when I walked out that door. I wasn’t crying over the cat, it was over Max…two days old. It’s no one’s fault that this experience reenacted the worst trauma of my life, but it did. Just ripped that scab off with such a force, that it took me hours to find the place to stop the bleeding.
I do not believe that we will see the end of adoption completely, but these solutions could very well produce a country like Australia where the relinquishment rates dropped about 95%. That is not unrealistic to me. Ideal, yes, but… People will want children that they cannot bare, and here will be people who have children who do not have any desire to ever be a parent. Yes, adoption will still be there, but let it be a safe guard that provides families for children who need homes rather than finding children for families that want them. Adoption relinquishment should be seen as the last possible choice.
No matter how perfect the outcome, it still hurts. The only way to avoid the hurt is to avoid adoption, and it’s too late for that, for me. The adoption of my son was perfect, I did everything the “right” way and still; the adoption of my son caused unnecessary pain and was wrong. This is way I speak out against adoption today. It’s not because I had a “bad experience”, it’s that it was a “good experience”, and yet there are too many tears and the worry never stops.
What strikes me now is that clearly, from the letters, one of my major concerns is what would I do afterwards, where would I go, how would I survive and that my mother’s home was an unsafe place for me to be. Like really, for my mental health, my mother was damaging to me and returning home after such a loss, I would be even more venerable, but yet.. they sent me back there after I had my baby.
They gladly took my child to protect him, but then left me right back here I was. How is this looking out for my best interests?
” I go to the agency. Talk about depressing! We had to go over all these horrible forms which I’ll have to sign. All official shit. No turning back. ” You understand that you are giving up all rights as a mother and you will never see your child again” I don’t want to sign THAT! It’s so horrid. Until today, it didn’t seem so very real. I feel like it’s a bad dream and I’d like someone to wake me up. There’s no choice. There’s no way out. And I don’t think I like this at all. I’ve always thought about it and felt I could do it fine, but now I can’t image really going through with it forever and I have to. It sucks. I hope I can just stick I tin a box deep deep down like I do with everything and not think about it. As long as I don’t think about it, I’ll do OK, If I can just do it and stuff it in a box.”
What Really Happened When I was Away On the surface, everything here is OK. Inside I’m feeling pretty lost – but nothing can be done about that. I’ll hold out. From my first letter written August 24th, 1987 I think it was back in ’06 when I first asked Laura if she still had my letters from Boston saved. I used to inquire about them periodically. I was writing out…
There are many stories that are so much like mine
Other women like me, wounds that don’t heal with time
They made it clear that we had no choice
They took away our child, our life, our voice
When I relinquished Max, it was suppose to be something that affected ME. The pain and loss was to be mine to bear as Max would be “better off”, his father unaware, my brother and extended family equally as clueless and my mother, well she didn’t matter.. at least I was not give pause to consider how nay one else felt. Like so many things in adoption, the professionals were wrong. Like we say, the “gift of adoption” just keep on giving and giving.. the pain has a huge ripple effect that touches every aspect of a woman’s lives including ALL our children