Adoption
On Being a Birthmother
Being a birth mother is a life sentence of pain: unrelenting, never-ending pain.
Society tells us that adoption is all kinds of wonderful things. Beautiful. Redemptive. God’s will. Best for the baby. A loving way to build a family. These words and phrases may describe how adoptive parents feel about adoption, but they completely ignore the trauma and loss that is the origin of every adoption story.
I became a birth mother because of a religious narrative that said my baby was “meant to be” someone else’s child. It was “God’s will” that he should have another mother, a mother who did not commit the sin of becoming pregnant outside the bonds of marriage.
“He needs two parents,” they said, never thinking that the adoptive parents may (and did) divorce. Never acknowledging the truth that it wasn’t about two parents at all but about my son’s ‘legitimacy’. Had I been married, conceived a son, and then tragically lost my husband, adoption would never have been a consideration.
It turns out it had nothing to do with two parents at all and in the end, my son was raised by a single mother after all, but not by his first mother.
I longed to parent my child but needed some support — as every mother does — support that was denied to me because of my sin. It seems strange that God put my son in my womb only to destine him for another woman’s arms; leaving two of the three of us bereft and hurting.
Adoption is different today, folks think. Adoptions are more open. There is less secrecy.
In spite of the propaganda, this is rarely true.
Open adoptions are promised by agencies and hopeful adoptive parents in order to persuade desperate women to relinquish their children. The majority of those ‘open adoptions’ close by the time the child is 6 years old. But even in the rare cases where an adoption remains open, the loss still cannot be diminished.
I always knew my son. I had the unicorn of adoption situations. The open-est of open adoptions. I was in the adoptive home visiting my son the day after we left the hospital and at least weekly for the first three years after that. He has grown up knowing me and spending time with my family. He is close with his grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. He and I have a close and loving relationship today.
When he was an infant, his adoptive mother would tell me how he cried more than her other children. How stiff and anxious his little body was — — until I visited. Then she could watch him relax into my arms. She could almost see his tiny body sigh with relief at my presence.
At the time, I was in so much pain myself that this was a comfort to me, knowing that he needed me. Now it is a knife in my heart to think that we, the two women who supposedly love him the most in the world, did this to him on purpose. We knew he was anxious and stressed and struggling without me and we CHOSE to keep him in that position. The position of only feeling safe, secure, and relaxed once a week? How was this best for my baby boy?
I spent a lot of years numb to the pain and would have described our relationship, mine with him and his family, as something special. I clung to the belief that the adoption was God’s will as a survival tactic. I knew (and even told his adoptive mom) that I had to believe that his adoption was God’s will or I would not be able to live with the choice that I made.
The adoptive mom and I became friends and I would have told anyone that I had one of the best open adoption situations and that what we were doing was an example of how adoption should be done.
In truth, I probably would still say that I had one of the best open adoption situations, but I understand better now that adoption is never going to be best. Adoption is always going to happen because first there was grief, separation, trauma, and loss.
Sometimes, a child will need alternate care and there are many opinions about how best that should be done. And often, that alternate care is only necessary temporarily. Adoptees and former foster youth should lead that conversation.
In so many circumstances, however, alternate care is NOT necessary. So often adoption happens because the world, or at least the adoption world, tells certain mothers they aren’t worthy to parent their own children. Mothers who are young or poor or alone and yet long to parent their children. With no solution to that lack of resources or support, desperate mothers often choose to relinquish so that their child can “have a better life.”
No one ever tells you that YOU are actually best for your child.
No one tells you that infants experience trauma when they are separated from their mothers at birth. No one reminds you that your baby already knows you. That they know your voice and heartbeat before they are born and can discern your scent from other women very shortly after birth.
No one talks about the connection you and your child already have. The language is intentional to convince the mother that she is not enough and it will be a brave and beautiful sacrifice to relinquish her child.
And for sure no one ever tells you that you will long for your child for the rest of your life. That “moving on” is fiction and there will never be a day that you don’t miss your child and feel the agony of all those lost moments.
Coming to understand that my son’s adoption was not God’s will after all has been one of the most painful, and strangely perhaps, one of the most healing/growing journeys of my life. I’ve learned that I prefer frank honest conversation about the consequences of relinquishment to a life trying to find comfort in fiction.
I’ve found a community of other grieving first mothers. A place where we are safe to suffer openly. A place where no one will say “But you gave their family such a wonderful gift!” I know now that pain and regret will always be my companions and that I will never be free from their unrelenting weight.
Pain comes in all shapes and sizes. In my birthmother support spaces, there are mothers whose children are in closed adoptions. Their pain is different from mine and from their view, maybe I am lucky. In those same spaces are mothers who are parenting subsequent children, a joy I never experienced despite only ever wanting to be a mother. And to me, maybe they are lucky.
There are all different types of mother grief; birth mother grief, mother of loss grief, infertility grief, to name a few. In this life, we cannot escape grief and pain, and so, rather than compare and compete with my grief, I will do my best to learn from it and to find joy alongside it.
Thank you for reading adoptēre, a publication to uplift and elevate the voices of adoptees and to audit the narrative of the institution of adoption. If you are an adoptee and interested in writing for adoptēre, click here to submit our writer’s interest form and we’ll get you added and published ASAP.
To learn more about the work of adoptēre, click here.
