stupidhippy.com

And adoptees, go easy on us first mothers; most of us have been waiting and praying for a reunion, while others are shocked and frightened when the initial call comes, given that some will have been keeping this terrible secret locked inside up for decades. We may have to rearrange our lives, people to tell, and some of us older mothers may be unable to do so.* We understand you are now an adult, but our physical and psychic memory of you is locked in that time we had to leave you. To us, you will always be: our child.

via Birth Mother, First Mother Forum: How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Adoptee/Birth Mother Reunion.

I appreciated the entire entry about the trouble with reunions, but this part struck particularly because I find myself having these feelings. Of course I know that E is grown, of course. But somehow the love gets stuck back when he was still mine, to the moments when I held him and he wasn’t someone else’s son. And when I see him now, he’s a grown person with a whole family that is not mine, parents that are not me, siblings who are not my children, a lifetime of experiences that I have no knowledge of, a life where I am not his mother. So I suppose it’s understandable that my heart clings to that time, however brief, when I was his mother, his only mother.

Since Al Gore invented the internet and I found a community of first mothers, I’ve read a lot of writing by other birthmothers, from all walks of life, and lots of different eras. Some had, and lost, their babies 40+ years ago, some around the time my son was born, 20-some years ago, some a lot more recent. I’m not talking hard statistics here, okay, but many many of us have a lot of feelings of regret about how our children came to be adopted. I only know of a few who aren’t pretty firmly in the camp of “I wish it hadn’t happened at all,” and even those mothers are conflicted. I have read one account by one birthmother who claimed she was perfectly fine, that yes, she missed her child, but yes, she was good and proud and happy with her decision. Her child was a year old.

I’ve read a number of times, by people who are NOT birthmothers, that it’s not really how all of us feel, that you only hear about the angry and sad and regretful ones because we’re blogging, loudly, that the happy ones don’t feel the need. Is this true? Are there scores of first mothers out there who are all fine and good with the adoption of their children and we just don’t know about it because they don’t speak about it publicly?

I said in no uncertain terms, my life had been irreparably damaged (“fucked up” is what I actually said) after I gave up my child; that some people have compared what happens to us to post-traumatic stress disorder (and let’s not go into that discussion all over again, please), that my life was never the same, that buckets of tears over the years followed this decision, that I never forgot and that giving up a child is a continuing source of sorrow, it is not like burying a child (which as some of you know, I have also done), and I explained why. The sorrow is great, but there is an ending to it; adoption grief continues like a song fragment in your mind that plays over and over again.

via Birth Mother, First Mother Forum: Telling a Stranger What It’s Like to be a Birth Mother.

It can be really hard to “come out” as a birth mother to new people.  You never know how they will react.  It comes up, though, in all sorts of weird situations.  People ask often if Becca is my only child.  There’s no way to answer that without it becoming weird.  Sometimes I just say I have an older son, but sometimes saying I have another child brings questions that make it become the weird thing, like how old is he and where is he, blah blah.  When asked, I never don’t say that I have another child, but I do sometimes try to keep it simple because I don’t want to talk about it with any old person.  Sometimes if I get a good vibe, I might say I have a grown son who was adopted at birth and that we are now several years into “reunion,” but eh, it’s still more complicated than any simple answer.  And it’s just a lot of personal crap to dump into a casual conversation that starts with, “is she your only child?”  Forget about the difficulty in trying to explain that no, no I don’t have a rosy view of adoption, not in the least.

Jennifer Lauck, On Finding My Mother. This video made me cry. All of it resonated for me, as a birthmother, but there was a part that struck me. When I met my son for the first time, I was so nervous. His whole life, I’d been filled with sorrow at the fact that I could see him on the street and not know him. But when I met him, I recognized him instantly. Of course this is you, my son, my son. I hadn’t seen him since the day he was born, I held him for a few short moments. But there he was, looking so much like my family and like his father’s family, so easily recognizable as us. Same as how Becca looks like both me and Ed. A gesture here, a turn of her head, in certain lights, I see Ed in her so strongly, though at first glance, she resembles me more in the face. At first glance, E looks like his father, and on the phone I can’t tell them apart. When Lauck described meeting her birth family, her mother and siblings, she said, here were these people who looked like me and smelled like me. This is weird, but when I met my son, he smelled like my son. I knew him instantly, the way his skin felt when I held his hand, I knew how his hair would feel if I touched it, the familiar sound of his voice, the first time I spoke to him on the phone, it slayed me. I knew if he were little and I could hold him on my lap, he would feel the same to me as Rebecca does.

It’s a special kind of torture, my reunion. I see my son standing in front of me, but he’ll never be mine. It is what it is, we can’t go back. But it’s hard loving him with all the ferocious love of a mother, and I’m practically a stranger to him.

Pfft. I will probably delete this entry later, I haven’t spoken to E about my blog and I feel pretty sure he’d be uncomfortable knowing I’d written about us like this here.

“Unwed mothers should be punished and they should be punished by taking their children away.” – Dr. Marion Hilliard of Women’s College Hospital, Daily Telegraph, (Toronto, November 1956)

also:

While being a single mom today carries no shame–well, maybe in high school it still does, the pregnant girl is Glee is less than thrilled, is she not?–sometimes I wonder how it’s possible to make our children understand what it was like back then, how we hid our pregnancies, how our parents totally freaked out–and some of them threw us out–how terrible a thing it was that we had sex and “got caught.”

via Birth Mother, First Mother Forum: O Lord, how long must birth mothers be punished?.

I do remember I said, “But would you want Madison treated like that? Because I don’t. And I wish you hadn’t been either.” Because whatever self-hatred we mothers struggle with lord knows that we want better for our daughters.

via Open Adoption Roundtable #17: Secrets Not Kept | this woman’s work.

I wish everyone thought about first mothers the way Dawn thinks of us, because we deserve people to care about our sadness.

I am an unashamed Glee fan. But I’ve been sort of ignoring the storyline of Quinn’s pregnancy, until tonight, of course. And of course I couldn’t just… suspend disbelief when adoption is concerned, I just couldn’t. So I was doubly pissed. First of all because of the way Quinn just stood there and said no she didn’t want to keep her baby. It was just so cold. And then the way Rachel’s mother, omg, rejected Rachel and then adopted Quinn’s baby? Gaaaah! WTF?!

My friend Joy shared this article with me on Facebook, I’m sharing it here, too, because it’s so great.  Anne Lamott on Mother’s Day.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete.

and

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

via Why I hate Mother’s Day – Salon.com.

I think it should be renamed Incubator Day. Or maybe Petri Dish Day.