Tag: Feeling Like A Failure

Shout Out To Fathers

It’s Father’s Day and so I should acknowledge that other gender in humanity and what they give to kids when they want to be a father. All too often, fatherhood comes upon a male of our species unplanned and unasked for. That can have a tragic outcome for the child who’s mother is also unprepared to parent. Many times these children end up adopted with all the complications and trauma that entails. Sometimes, the mother tries but the children end up in foster care – either adopted eventually or again out of the system.

In my own case, the three children I have birthed were all planned. I am grateful for that. Both fathers have been good fathers to their children. My own dad, gone now for almost a decade, did the “right thing” by my teenage mom and me when she turned up pregnant, still in high school, and after he had only started at a university. He gave up his own dreams of higher education to go to work in a refinery – often very long, double shift hours – to support his family which eventually included 2 younger sisters for me as well.

My own daughter ended up being raised by her dad and step-mother when I proved unable to financially provide for the two of us as a single mom. Though that left me feeling like a failure as a mom, when I remarried later in life, my husband surprised me by telling me after a couple of Margaritas that he had been thinking he wanted to be a dad after all (he had been grateful I had already done that and that there was no pressure on him). He has been an awesome, dedicated father willing to drop whatever else he was doing if called up by his sons. I was healed of some of my earlier motherhood issues by discovering I could actually be a decent mom.

Many times, in my all things adoption related group, men have stepped up and actually fought the legal system to regain a child that was given up for adoption by their single mom. I have a huge admiration for such men and they do an awesome job of parenting. Happy Father’s Day to all men who have found themselves, one way or other, parenting a child – especially those who had to do so without the mom’s involvement, for whatever reason. You are true heroes !!

Multi-Generational Impacts

I did read this book and I know that the impacts of adoption did have generational effects. I’ve written about this before. In today’s story, an adoptee shares it’s effects in her life and family.

I see many adoptees who have such beautiful relationships with their own children. Are there others out there who struggle with relationships with their own children? My birth mother and I were both products of the baby snatch era. She discovered she was bought by her parents only after they died. She abandoned me as a toddler to an orphanage. I was adopted but later returned to foster care by my adopted parents. I became pregnant at 15 and forced to give birth. I could not place my son for adoption due to my own negative experience as an adoptee but received no form of parenting support/skill training. My birth mother found me as a young adult (only after finding her birth mother first) – only to disown and reabandon me. I have no relationship with my adopted mother, my birth mother, or adult son. I feel like I failed to interrupt multi generational trauma. My failure pains me greatly and I feel very alone in this.