Adoption | Birthmother | First Mother
Baby Boxes and Shame
If there is shame in relinquishing a baby, whose shame is it, exactly?
Recently, I did something dumb. I wandered into the comments section on a Facebook post about “safe surrender” baby boxes and shared my two cents: I hate baby boxes!
They paint a picture of a society so completely devoid of community and compassion. My comments brought out all the angry emojis 😡 and “adoption is so beautiful” folks. Some I engaged with; some I ignored. I tried to stay calm and avoid getting sucked into too many side arguments. I advocated consistently for mother and child stating that a truly compassionate society would not throw away the mother, but would care for both mother and child because the best outcome for both is keeping their family together.
I was also vulnerable in those comments; sharing my own story of relinquishing my son.
I noticed an interesting trend in some of the comments and it’s something I’ve bumped into before. Repeatedly, people accused me of shaming mothers. Like I said, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this and so I needed to consider whether it was true. Was it the fact that I said babies need their mothers? Maybe saying that babies need their mothers is shaming mothers who were unable to keep their children?
I remember the first time someone told me that my son needed me. It didn’t make me feel anything at all like shame. I was thrilled. Thrilled to hear that, contrary to what the adoption propaganda tells us, I was not actually unnecessary to my son after all!
I had longed to parent him but was persuaded that it was God’s will that he should be adopted. I was told that there was another mother who was better for my own son than I was because of my sin. It must have felt wrong to me on some level to believe that.
Because I just remember how right it sounded to hear that he needed ME.
Granted, if we acknowledge that our babies need their natural mothers and not just any stranger substitute, we might then have to admit that it’s possible that relinquishing isn’t best for our kids after all. And maybe that is where the shame comes in. It feels so much nicer, so much safer to say, “I did it so my baby could have a better life. So they can have all the things I could never give them.”
I imagine wrapping myself in those words like a heavy blanket.
It’s not a happy feeling, but it still provides comfort to think that when I wasn’t at my best, I gave him the very best I could. I no longer believe it’s true but I remember a time when I clung to the idea that my boy’s adoption was “God’s will” like a life preserver. The idea that he was exactly where God would have him meant that it didn’t matter that I was drowning in my pain.
It meant that I really had been the very best mother. I needed to believe that.
In truth, babies look for their mothers when they are born. They need us to feel safe and whenever possible, I support family preservation first.
I believe my most compassionate and humane response to both mother and baby is to support their success TOGETHER.
If there’s shame, there’s enough to go around
If I am shaming anyone, I’m shaming us all collectively for accepting a society that chooses who is valuable and who can be thrown away. I do not blame desperate mothers for making what seemed like their only choice. But, as I argued in the comment section of that post, a caring and compassionate society would not discard the mother so that they could adopt the baby. A caring and compassionate society would hold the mother well so that she can be there for her child who needs HER.
Is this an oversimplification? Yes, I’m sure. I can hear all your voices in my head clamoring to tell me the ways your situation was different. The specifics about why it really was best in your/your kid’s situation. I don’t need to know those details and if they aren’t your story, please don’t tell me your child’s story. It doesn’t belong to you.
I also know this opens the door to a million conversations in so many directions, like: what about children who legitimately need alternate care? How can we ‘do adoption well’? Should we do adoption at all? Or perhaps a completely different way of doing alternate care when necessary? And even outside of adoption land, questions like who pays for the cost of all this “care and compassion”? Because cost/money is always at the root of every problem and the barrier to any solution.
I didn’t write this to resolve all of those questions here today; although along the way I’ve listened to many opinions and formed a few of my own. I don’t think I have all the answers but I won’t let that stop me from challenging false narratives around current systems.
Back to shame.
I’m still a little confused and curious. Is defining relinquishing mothers as “necessary” the thing that causes shame? Or is this just another way that adoption propaganda rewrites truth and twists our perception of what we should be ashamed of?
The industry needs mothers to continue believing that the very best gift we can give our babies is a different family, another mother. In that case, we are told it would be selfish to consider raising our own child so in fact the very thing I am suggesting (parenting) actually becomes the shameful thing.
This rainbows and unicorns narrative around adoption is so deeply ingrained that people have no paradigm for anything else. Family preservation sounds so much like gibberish to some that when I say the words, they respond, “You’re saying we should just leave kids in homes where they’re being abused?!?!”
We should know something has gone wrong with the story when language becomes so misunderstood this way.
There is already so much shame for a relinquishing mother. Far be it from me to add more. But my views on these horrific baby boxes remain the same. Nothing about them spells compassion. All I can see is desperation, heartache, and loss.
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