Tag: Romantic Love

Not Giving Her Up

Isabel and Lucy

In The Light Between Oceans, eventually truth and one’s conscience force a fierce mother to give up the child which isn’t actually hers. This sometimes happens in adoptions when the biological genetic parent decides they are not going to surrender their child to others to raise.

The story is a study in consequences. Every action begets a reaction. Every decision has its consequences, some unintended, but which have the capacity to cause the loss of happiness for the people involved. A lighthouse keeper and his wife discover a baby in a small boat alongside the child’s dead father. Isabel, his wife, has suffered through two miscarriages. The baby is like a gift from the sea and what the woman needs to heal the grief of her infertility. So, of course when the baby girl washes ashore in a small boat, Isabel adopts the infant as her own. Though truth be told, even though he loves his wife dearly, the husband has misgivings from the beginning, which will eventually force him to do the right thing by the woman who’s child the little girl actually is.

The movie is all about love, and the various forms of love; that between a husband and his wife, and that of a mother for her child (whether or not biological). The lighthouse keeper knows that he is required by law to report the discovery of the dead man and baby. However, his wife fears that the baby will be sent to an orphanage. She persuades her husband to pass the baby off as their own daughter, and though reluctant, he agrees out of the love he has for her and concern for the pain she suffers. He buries the baby’s father on the island and the couple names the infant girl Lucy.

When the man sees a woman kneeling in front of a grave bearing the names of her husband and infant daughter who were lost at sea, the date on the memorial stone matches the date that they found the baby girl. This causes him to realize that Lucy is likely the woman’s biological daughter. He writes anonymously to that woman to tell her that her husband is dead but that her infant daughter is safe, loved and well cared for.

This woman’s husband was German and she had married him shortly after the end of World War I. That marriage had therefore been controversial in their local community. When her husband is accosted in the street by a drunken crowd, he then jumped into a rowboat and fled with his baby daughter. In the boat with the baby was a unique silver rattle. Tormented by his conscience, he sends the child’s mother the rattle anonymously as proof that the baby actually is her lost child. Ultimately, this action leads to the lighthouse keeper’s arrest. His wife, Isabel, is angry that he is willing to give Lucy away after she has lived with them for several years.

After the little girl is returned to her biological family, she  runs away in an effort to return to the lighthouse and her “real parents.” She is found and taken back to her biological mother. The child’s original name was Grace and after she has begun to finally bond with her biological mother and maternal grandfather, they agree to call her “Lucy Grace” as a compromise with the little girl’s demands. At the end, though Isabel has passed away, the now 27-year-old woman finds the lighthouse keeper who had maintained the “no contact” ruling handed down for 18 years. Before her death, Isabel had written a letter to Lucy, in case she ever sought contact with the couple on her own. After reading it, the emotional young woman thanks the only father she knew for the first four years of her life, for rescuing and raising her on the lighthouse island.

The story reminded me of my cousin. She spent several years being raised by her (our) grandmother. It was traumatic for her to be wrest away by her biological mother’s return. She resented her aunt who was able to remain with the grandmother, when she was forced to leave someone she dearly loved.

Most of the time, when biological parents demand the return of a baby they had previously given up for adoption, the child has not had several years to bond with someone else. When that does happen, it can be very difficult for a child to give up the “fantasy” of the only parents that child has ever known. This happens rarely but on occasion, especially in the case of a father who did not originally consent to the adoption but is later given custody by a court of law.

The movie trailer –

It’s Complicated

I didn’t hate motherhood but circumstances robbed me of it with my first child. She ended up being raised by her dad and a step-mother, after I left her temporarily in the care of her paternal grandmother. This morning I was reading an edited extract from Undo Motherhood by Diana Karklin. Stories from women all over the planet about how motherhood was not a welcomed event in their lives.

At the time I left my daughter, it didn’t feel like it was because I didn’t love being her mother, I always did love that but was I committed to it ? Reading these stories today, I wonder at my lack of maturity and sense of responsibility at the time. I think I always expected to do something like my own mother did – get married and immediately have children, while going to work everyday to contribute to the family income. I was also into “having a good time” and all that meant as someone in their early 20s – whether in a marriage or not.

Even so, it’s strange that I married. During my senior year in high school, that had not been my plan. I was going to share an apartment with my best friend. The first time I went out with the man who I would marry and have a child with, I told my mom when I came back from that date that it was never going to work out. Then, he showed me a ring and asked me to marry him and so, I did.

I still think marriage isn’t a good bargain for a woman, even though I then married a second time and had two sons with the man who is my husband today. If anything happens that takes him from me and leaves me yet living, I cannot imagine marrying again. We have now been married a long time and so, this time it worked out but with a bump or two along the way – yet the marriage has been able to endure.

Reading the article in The Guardian today – “The women who wish they weren’t mothers: ‘An unwanted pregnancy lasts a lifetime’ “ – has given me pause in reflecting on my own life. Also today, in the Science of Mind magazine which shares the philosophy of a man named Ernest Holmes who created a practice based upon the philosophies of the world and developments in science, I was also given more pause to reflect on romantic love.

The author, Rev Dr Jim Lockard, reflected on what it means to be human and to have a spiritual nature. Our biological selves seek to procreate, as does all life. Our emotional selves seek connection and to give and receive love with a special other to experience a deep feeling of fulfillment. Our intellectual selves seek to find a partner to share our human experiences and to create a family structure. Our spiritual selves seek to link to another to experience the joining of spiritual identities in relationship.

Clearly on many levels, having children fulfills a lot of those aspects and qualities of life, as much or sometimes more than a romantic partner can. Just as The Guardian piece made clear – it is often our cultures that have set rules and expectations about our adult lives. Even as the rigidity of narrow gender definitions have been rapidly changing, with the overturn of Roe v Wade, many women feel they are being pushed back into another time that they thought was in the past. They may be forced into giving birth, due to whatever reason and circumstance, even though they aren’t craving to fulfill the duties of motherhood. Children do best when they are intended and wanted. When they are not – wounding and trauma are the result. Just as an unwanted pregnancy lasts a lifetime, regardless of how long that initial romantic relationship endures, or even how that one night stand or rape has become imprinted on a woman’s soul, what happens to that child lasts a lifetime as well.

The nature of falling in love is a mixture of biological urges, emotional longings, rational explanations and spiritual connections. To fall in love is to exist in instability and the projection of our unconscious expectations onto another person. Our sense of rational choice is diminished. Many women wake up one day to realize that they fell in love with someone their ego was imagining and not a reality the other person was able to actually be – long term. A man is often free to walk away, leaving a woman forced to carry the burden of their children for at least 2 decades – truly for both the mother’s and the children’s lifetimes. Whether a father does or not is never guaranteed.