Tag: Saving Our Sisters

Reasons Why A Woman Chooses Adoption

Read this today –

I am an expectant mother, due in a couple weeks. I’m single and the baby’s father has recently informed me he wants no part in parenting but I am confident he will pay child support (though I know he prays I choose adoption, though his opinion on that matter is not even on my radar).

I am also in a transitional place in my life: staying in a very small apartment with a friend who is supporting me, no job, and won’t be able to raise a baby here. I don’t have safe family I can stay with, and my friends live in different corners of the country and are not a viable option right now either.

I’ve spoken to a few Hopeful Adoptive Parents and feel comfortable with one couple in particular, but with the clock ticking & COVID precautions in place, I don’t feel ready to make that choice: either to choose them to raise my child OR to choose adoption at all. But I feel like my back is up against a wall: I don’t have a safe place to raise a baby and I don’t have any income at the moment but in no way do I want to make a rash decision to relinquish my rights just because time is running out. Luckily the Hopeful Adoptive Parents are NOT pressuring me in any way, shape, or form so that’s not an issue.

I read up on a thread of resources posted a while ago, and I saw Safe-Families mentioned as an option. There is a chapter about 3.5 hours from me.

Another well-known option is called Saving Our Sisters.

One voice of experience wrote – “Listen to those of us who have walked this path. I am 73 and will never recover from the loss of adoption. Take heed.”

Another woman offers this – “My best advice is to try to parent. People will take a toddler as fast as a baby. If you can’t do it, you have options BUT if you go through with adoption, you can not get your baby back. Things will work out, just try.”

One woman cautioned – You would “think that voluntary placement would mean that she could get them back just as easily. Not the case. She had to prove herself fit.”  This is so close to what my maternal grandmother went through it breaks my heart that this is still how it goes.  My grandmother lost my mom to Georgia Tann during her brutal reign.

In the final analysis –

The #1 thing your baby needs is you. Just you. Not a nice house, not a nursery, not baby gear, not anything that can be bought. Some second hand baby clothes and cloth diapers, a good sling and a car seat if you have a car is all you really need to take great care of your baby. If you can have a place where you can live safely, your baby will be happy.

The Broken Birth Mom

This sculpture speaks so strongly to my own heart.  I empathize with my grandmothers who gave up my parents to adoption.  In a sense, though less permanently, I am one myself.  Each of my sisters truly are.  There are no words for how this haunts a person.  No mother should have to live without her child, even though I do understand that sometimes the safety issues are so strong because that mother is so broken as a person, the child isn’t safe with her.  I get it.

Adoption isn’t just a one-time event and it’s over. It is never over, it can’t be and it isn’t.  It is something that follows an adoptee and their original parents throughout their lives.

I have obsessed in my guilt for not raising my daughter. Just like my maternal grandmother, I never intended to leave her daily life permanently. In my effort, just as it was in my grandmother’s effort, to work things out financially, circumstances changed and it was no longer the best outcome for her to take her back. Both my maternal grandmother and myself would have, if it had been possible or truly made sense to step back in.

There were no role models for absentee mothers in the early 1970s though one read a lot of stories about absentee fathers.  I realize I caused the situation for myself. My grandmother stepped into a serious trap without realizing it when she turned to Porter-Leath Orphanage in Memphis TN for temporary care of my mom.

The superintendent there betrayed my grandmother and my mom to a master baby thief.  Miss Georgia Tann was backed up by her good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, in her pressure campaign to exploit my grandmother and wrest my mom out of her possession so that she could sell her to my adoptive grandmother.

Being a birth mom who permanently surrenders her child is not a club you should want to join.  It is a grief that lasts a lifetime. The pain of that wound will change over time but it will never go away. It will always be there.  I have spent years trying to resolve my own.  I know the reasons and the causes but there is no recovering lost time and those precious memories of your child growing up.

If you are an expectant mother, especially a single and financially challenged young woman, seek out the help that will make it possible for you to keep your baby. You will be glad you did.  Here’s one place – https://savingoursistersadoption.org/