Finding The Right Fit

Therapy is hard. Finding a good fit with a therapist is hard too. It takes emotional effort and money but when it fits it’s great. Best thing ever. An adoptee from 1963 who spent 1 month in isolation before adoption, writes (including summing it up with the sentences above )-

As I was starting to unpack and really look at what adoption did to me – to us – a kept therapist told me, “But I know adoptees who are fine”. So I searched out one who was a former foster care youth and adopted at age 3. I thought she’d be a good fit, but she sacked me after 3 or 4 sessions because she couldn’t go to those places with me. I freaked her out. She couldn’t look at her own adoption wounds and didn’t want to.

Then my girlfriend was talking to a friend who had lost a baby (stillborn) and was seeing a therapist to help her cope. The therapist was a midwife for 10 years with hundreds of births behind her. She focuses her clinic on mother baby bond traumas. She sees women who have lost children and children who’ve lost mothers – and now me. I wrote to her and laid out where I was at in my journey out of the fog and, nearly 4 years ago, she agreed to make a space for me.

Answering Hard Questions

Today’s complicated situation (not my own) – I am currently expecting and due in December. My pregnancy was unplanned with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with, and I initially considered abortion but chose to pursue open adoption instead. The adoptive parents I selected are family—my sister-in-law’s sister—so my son would grow up with his cousins in the town I’m from and where some of my family still live. They’ve struggled with infertility, having faced four miscarriages and a stillborn, and they’re overjoyed about this baby.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the future and how I’ll respond when my son asks, “Why did you give me up?” My reasons feel rooted in fear and selfishness, and I’m not sure they’re good enough. I’m 27, with a stable job, savings, no drug issues, and not in any dire circumstances. I’ve just never wanted kids and fear the unknown challenges of single parenting.

I’ve been researching adoption’s impact on both the child and the birth mother and am realizing the deep grief, loss, and trauma involved. It’s making me reconsider my decision to place him for adoption. I fear making this decision will make him grow up feeling rejected by me, but also feeling like a second choice child to the hopeful adoptive parents because of their inability to have biological children.

The HAP are flying out in a few days, and they don’t know I’m having second thoughts. I’m terrified of hurting them. Should I tell them before they come, or wait to talk in person?

If I keep my son, I’ll be raising him as a single mom. Even then, he’ll face the pain of growing up without an involved father. The adoptive family offers a stable, loving two-parent home with the means to provide a private education and a secure future.

For those of you who are adoptees, my question is: Looking back, would you have preferred to stay with your biological mother, even if it meant a tougher life, or be with adoptive parents who could offer more stability and opportunities?

Any thoughts, personal experiences, or advice would mean the world to me. This is the hardest decision I’ve ever faced, and I want to do what’s best for my son, not just what’s easiest for me. I know both decisions are a hard path, so I’m not saying giving up my son for adoption is “easy”, but it’s the “easy” way out of responsibility and fear of the unknown, and it feels deeply selfish. There is a ton of fear surrounding open adoption too with not knowing if it will stay open, or if I’ll end up regretting my decision.

An adoptee reminds her – you don’t owe anyone your baby. Another adoptee admits – I had great adopted parents. Even so, it didn’t stop me from wondering why I was given away. I never felt whole, and still don’t 40 years later. Another adoptee shares – Tons of struggles with my identity, horrible abandonment and attachment issues. One says – And I definitely still have trauma. And another one – I love my adoptive parents, but the feelings of grief and abandonment are pervasive in my life.

A mother shares her own journey – I already had three kids when I ended up with an unplanned pregnancy. I wanted an abortion but ultimately couldn’t go through with it. Then I regretted not going through with it for a looooong time. Like even once my baby was here. So then I contemplated doing adoption, but I’d cry about the trauma it would cause our whole family. Of what I was robbing my innocent baby of. Of the stories from adult adoptees. Of how he would always feel unloved and unwanted because he was the one that didn’t get to stay. And then once he was about 10 months, it just clicked for me. I was listening to a song about abortion in the car and was thinking “that’s what I should have done” and I looked at him in the camera and an immense wave of sadness hit me. And I realized just how perfectly my 4th child has fit into our lives. It was hard. It still is (life would certainly be easier without a one year old, especially as my older kids are in school). But I don’t have any regret anymore. And I remember someone a long time ago told me “you baby is just as adoptable at 6 months as a newborn, so give it time”. It helps get the hormones a little more under control, helps you adjust to life a bit, etc.

Staying With Mom Is Best

From my all things adoption group today. In a parenting group, the admin shared a post to open discussion. It was written by a hopeful adoptive parent whose plans fell through shortly after birth.

I was pleasantly surprised that many of the comments focused on the fact that staying with mom is best for baby. Many also expressed empathy for the woman who wanted a baby and couldn’t have one. Knowing my own deep joy at being a mother, I empathize with those who cannot… but not to the degree that it clouds my judgment about what real love for a child is (protecting their relationship with their mother, if at all possible).

I can’t know the pain of infertility, because I’ve not lived that life. I’m sad for those who do. But I HAVE lived the life of someone separated from my genetic mirrors and raised as second class in a family that wasn’t mine. Filling a hole in a would-be mother’s heart doesn’t justify the creation of holes in the child’s. Ever.

One comment in particular struck me. It was disgusting, and I don’t have the ability to respond to it without being very nasty. A woman claimed that getting up a woman’s hopes of receiving a child and then taking it away at birth is the same pain as delivering a stillborn baby.

I am so angry. Just… so, so angry.

Their logic doesn’t logic.

She went on and on about the pain of infertility, which I don’t at all seek to minimize. She wrote about the hopes of carrying her “own” baby. The truth is right there in her words. They know the difference. Given a choice, OF COURSE they’d choose to carry their “own”. But since they can’t, they selfishly want to steal or buy someone else’s for the sake of their own feelings, over the child’s or the true mother’s.

Her words recognize the profound, undeniable, biological, emotional, and spiritual difference of producing offspring versus stealing them. And yet in the next breath, she wants to claim the pain is identical to losing one carried in the mother’s own body. Gross.

One commenter made a strong case – it’s not always just warped selfishness with humans. There is the component of it being an evolutionary instinct. This doesn’t excuse us from doing the work and therapy to keep from seeking the injury to other people’s children that adoption is. We need to be better than our natural instincts. We can hold people to higher standards, while still recognizing that turning off the deep desire to raise children, for some, is about as easy as turning off clinical depression for others.

Another one admitted – I’m “maternally driven”, and I had an emergency hysterectomy. I have one biological child. I always wanted to have a lot of kids, but it wasn’t in the cards. I went to therapy. I got a dog. I sought out dogs and cats. Because my inability to have more children doesn’t give me the right to someone else’s children. But my pathological need to care for someone/something makes animal rescue PERFECT for me. And yes, it’s absolutely a pathology. I think that needs to be recognized and openly talked about more. It’s not BAD. It just IS, and there are healthy outlets for it.

One noted – This is such a parent focused view, to equate their loss as a death – when the baby is alive – just shows how much the focus is not on the child whatsoever.

One said – I went through infertility and it never even occurred to me to want to adopt. I wanted my own babies, not someone else’s. The thought of raising someone else’s child is honestly so unappealing to me. I bet it’s unappealing to a lot of infertile women.

To which someone else replied directly – It’s baffling to me that this *completely reasonable and valid position* is somehow controversial to a lot of people. And unfashionable. We’re supposed to think that the ability to pretend a child that isn’t your own, *is* your own, is a sign of being a good person, somebody who has ~evolved~ beyond our ~stupid~ animalistic need for tangible, biological connection. I’ve been told I’m a sociopathic monster, a narcissist, devoid of empathy, just because I feel the same way as you. Somebody else’s baby would not be my baby. It’s not the same as my baby. To deny that is ridiculous, it’s anti-science, it’s an actively harmful delusion. I’ve not been through infertility, but I can say that recently birthing my own first child has cemented this so firmly in my heart. My son is not a token who could be swapped interchangeably with any other random infant and I could not be swapped interchangeably with any other woman to be his mother. Our relationship is specific to the two of us, even six days into his life.

A Failed Adoption Is Not The Same Thing

A woman shares this – Someone’s asking how to support a friend whose adoption has been disrupted at [a specific point in an unborn baby’s gestation]. This friend is a would be adoptive parent. The responses to this situation, that include some from other adoptive parents who identify themselves as having experienced this, equate it to a death in the family, stillbirth, or trauma.

Certainly, one could relate the two up to a point. The prospective adoptive parents have been excited about the pending adoption. They have the expectation of holding a newborn in their arms. They may have invested in a crib, baby clothes and diapers among their other preparations. But the similarity stops there.

My daughter experienced a stillbirth with her first pregnancy. She describes to me being given the expelled fetus in a blanket to hold and say goodbye to at the hospital. She tells me that when she became pregnant again with my grandson, she could hear this first one saying to her in her heart, you weren’t ready for me then.

Another woman shares (she is an adoptive parent) – I have had two late term stillbirths. Both were cord deaths. In no way, shape or form would I say that a failed adoption is at all related to experiencing a stillbirth or death loss. You cannot even put the two together. It’s only recently that stillbirth has been allowed to even be spoken about. This is why pre-birth adoption matching of unborn babies to be shouldn’t be allowed! Adoptive parents who compare the two, taking away from the women who have had an actual loss by birthing a stillbirth baby by comparing that tremendous sorrow with a belief that their loss of a baby because the expectant mother has changed her mind is a kind of mental illness.

An adoption reform response to prospective adoptive parents experiencing this kind of loss could be – “While this is a type of loss for your family, can you shift your perspective and realize how amazing it is that this mother and your family will not have to live with the certain regrets surrounding an adoption? It is a lovely and precious thing for this mom to be able to parent – just as it would have been for you.”

Help Rather Than Hinder

So you are preparing to adopt a child. You may feel uncomfortable, protective, or defensive about the reality of your child’s pre-adoption loss of the first family.

“The moment the subject of the adoptee’s woundedness and loss comes up, it’s like a shield goes up and they can’t hear a word you say,” Jayne Schooler, adoption professional and author.

It’s painful to enter into your child’s suffering. It’s so much easier to assume that all is well inside your child, especially if she hasn’t manifested any obvious problems.

The first thing your child wants you to know is this: I am a grieving child. I came to you because of loss—one that was not your fault and that you can’t erase.

Present circumstances can trigger unresolved loss for an adopted child. They can and do mourn the mother who carried them for nine months in her womb, whose face they never saw, and whose heartbeat was their original source of security.

Most adoptive parents, instead of helping their child to grieve the loss and find closure, deny his past losses and romanticize his adoption. Denying loss and failing to grieve can keep parents and children at arms’ length instead of in a healthy, invested relationship.

Webster’s defines romanticism as “imbued with or dominated by idealism; fanciful; impractical; unrealistic; starry-eyed, dreamy; head-in-the-clouds; out of touch with reality.”

Could it be that you have unknowingly been an adoption romanticist all these years ?

The best thing you can do to help your child is to grieve your own losses which may have occurred prior to adoption—losses such as infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, or death—and to let yourself feel sad for your child’s losses and your inability to protect him from whatever happened to him prior to joining your family.

Thanks to Sherrie Eldridge for expressing these thoughts that I have excerpted for today’s blog. You can find her thoughts here – https://sherrieeldridgeadoption.blog/.