In my last post, Australia’s Adoption Apology, I was informed that comparing Adoption to the Holocaust was not in good taste or to quote: “offensive and overblown. Adoption is bad, and many were hurt. The Holocaust was the murder of 6 million men women and children for no reason other than that they were Jewish, or Gay or handicapped or Gypsies or some Slavs. The two things are just…
Adoption is a very isolating experience. Many birth mothers and adoptees go through life without having other people understand the journey and the lifelong affects post-relinquishment. Most birthmother support focuses on pre-birth and immediately post-adoption, but relinquishment changes everything. The feelings change over time, while new situations in life have a funny way of bringing up the initial loss and grief. Plus, losing a newborn is one thing, 10 years later, it’s a whole childhood you have missed. In 20 years, it’s a life. Death, marriages, new births, search and reunion are all frequent triggers and moms often need additional support, or just someone who understands.
I certainly have found that I was not prepared for what it all entails to be a birthmother, but I did learn some things along the way that might help.
One of the things that I have learned in the many years of living life as a birthmother is that it is normal to be fighting depression at holidays and feeling sad on my adopted son’s birthday. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to fight it off and overcome the depression and holiday blues. It doesn’t matter how great the rest of my life might be. It doesn’t matter if I consciously even remember. On a cellular level, every year like clockwork, it hits.
While other people also suffer from the holiday blues, and other life issues to trigger adoption feelings during non-holiday times, a birthmother experiencing painful memories and sadness is normal on an adoptees birthday. On the same vein, many adoptees report of feeling sad and uncomfortable on their birthdays as well.
It makes it easier to overcome this depression in some way by understanding that the adoption holiday/birthday depression is normal and to expect it, rather than fight it. Know that it is situational depression and often, will pass with the change of the calendar pages. Know that you are not alone in feeling this way.
The established stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, often don’t seem to help the grief experienced by birth mothers and adoption losses.
Unlike the grief felt from a death, the loss from adoption is often said to be a complicated grief or a continuous grief. As life for both parties carries on through the years, the separation continues to add more missed opportunities or milestones that are normally shared with one’s children.
To complicated matters even further, some mothers have had to bury their feelings and have never had the opportunity to express them. Others, refuse to acknowledge a loss from adoption separation, and cling to the fairy tale versions where the birthmother is some heroic figure. Still other mothers, find that it is not until an adoption reunion with their lost children, does the full spectrum of feelings, including grief.
One cannot avoid the feelings of grief and be able to live a relatively normal and productive life. While the grief process is not pretty, it is only by dealing with the grief and loss can one be able to experience emotions fully, both the positive and the negative feelings.
The best advice I can give anyone who needs help with the grieving process in adoption is to know that you are not alone in it. What you feel is normal.
If you are facing an unplanned pregnancy and are considering giving the baby up for adoption, there are many things you should know before making an adoption plan.
In fact, there are many things that you should know about the process of adoption before you make any contact at all with a infant domestic adoption agency.
This is the really important stuff that NO adoption agency will EVER tell you!!!!
Often I feel that adoption denial is too strong a word.
Many people enter into adoption believing in some form of its innate goodness. There is often a real shock and a true disbelief that what they wanted to believe about adoption is different than the truth. That’s not denial, but just being unaware. The question is whether or now, we are able to see past what we want to believe and see the reality presented by the facts. This takes time as we need to process those changes in thought. Some resistance, the continued disbelief, is normal.
I, too, used to think that adoption was the greatest win-win solution to an planned pregnancy. I thought I was smarter, more selfless, and stronger because I gave my newborn son away to others. I was proud of my heroic act for the first dozen years after relinquishing my baby to adoption.
I understand why so many birthmothers do not want to see, cannot bring themselves to see what adoption really means. It’s not just yummy tasting kool aid, it’s survival. So survive. I mean that. It’s Ok if you don’t want to believe me now. Maybe you never will, but maybe one day you find yourself having your own WTF moment, lying on the kitchen floor in a heap, wondering why this adoption stuff keeps on bringing your down. On that day, remember me and come on back. I’ll be waiting for you.
This blog is mostly about living as a birthmother because since November 18th, 1987, that has been the only way I have left to live. That’s the day I signed the relinquishment papers in some dark office in Newton, MA and there has never been a way to get back to the life that could have been. I gave away my baby to people I had never met and then tried to go on living my life as the agency and everyone else expected me to. It didn’t work.
So, more than 28 years later; adoption is a huge force on my life affect me and my whole family every single day. I have no choice anymore. I can’t go back and change it, so I blog. Chances are, if you have found your way here to this blog, you are needing to know what it means to live the life of a birthmother.
What Does the West Australian Adoption Apology Mean? For so many years, we have turned and looked to Austria as a model for adoption. Australia opened their records. Australia changed adoption practices. Australia does not nearly have the same number of domestic infant adoption as the US does proportionally. Australia honors the mother and child, their bond, values motherhood. So very far ahead of us in America, and yet, the…
So this is one of those Social Media Bandwagons that I end up jumping on. You know, how I pay attention to all this stuff at my job and then apply it to Adoptionland. Or really, it happened the other way around, I learned all this stuff in Adoptionland, and it turned into the job? They all blur sometimes! Anyway, we get home from dinner tonight to find that my…
“Before You Leave” an Adoption Story Once again, I find myself happy that I landed in this weird wide adoption world. Yes, I hate that adoption is in my life and probably always will hate how my family was separated. Yet, as always I am so thankful for all the wonderful people that I get to met along this journey. One of those people is Mary Gauthier.
Loving Land of Gazillion Adoptees “Unofficial” Adoption Blog Week! I got Kevin’s secret message Secret message for other bloggers about the week of February 26th, aka, “Why the adoption establishment annoys the heck out of us” Blog Week. It really wasn’t that secret. I’m liking the idea that if enough of us participate, then it goes from “Unofficial” to “Official” The adoption establishment annoys the heck out of me…
What happens AFTER the Adoptee Rights Demonstration? The profit in adoption, happened along time ago in most of our lives. As we all know, there is NO money in the work that we do. When it comes to changing laws, the adoption groups are marginalized, underrepresented, ignored, and unfunded. That’s one of the main reasons we have the demonstration at the NCSL Summits. The good old fashioned stick waving chanting protest is…
I’m 18 and have no diploma or GED. I plan on going to college and doing something with myself, but as of right now I live with someone else. I feel very sad thinking about this baby and about how my relationship and life is going to change and I’m curious about whether this is hormones or not. I feel HORRIBLE for the way I feel. Do you think I can have a baby now, keep her and still have a happy life and relationships?
What the world thinks of birthmothers: whores, prostitutes, family building angels. Googel search results produce me in the CrackWhore BirthMother T shirt as a “family building angel”
Former Hudson Valley Adoptee Born December 25th, 1976 Searching for His Birthmother While most of the world sees adoption as a good thing, which is forever finding families for unwanted children, I view the system a little differently. As a birthmother who fights for Adoptee Rights, I often focus more on the legislative injustices, systematic corruption, and the loss that is an automatic part of adoption.