The idea of a birthparent relationship can be a scary thought for the couple considering adoption. You can read the books that say it’s best for the kids and you’ll probably feel pressured by an agency to agree to a high level of contact with birthparents. If you talk to me about how I feel about the birthparents of my kids, you’ll hear a lot about my love for them and my gratitude for their gift, but I want to be honest here—it hasn’t been an easy or natural road to get to this understanding. Adoptive parents are looking for a child to love, but aren’t necessarily looking for a birthfamily to have a lifelong connection with. You can feel like you’re being pushed into this relationship while you’re struggling with your own frustrations and grief. I want you to understand that it isn’t wrong to work through those feelings. And I want you to hear the story of how I came to have peace about it.
I had a friend in college who I admired a lot. Shayla was a couple years older than I was and seemed like she was wise in a way that made her cool and somebody you’d go to for advice. She was pretty and honest and organized and she had a Jeep. She was my hero. My freshmen year at college somebody told me Shayla had placed a baby for adoption when she was in high school. I had no context for that thought. It made her seem like somebody who knew what the real world was about in a way maybe I never would. But I really couldn’t imagine what that was like for her and I didn’t try to too hard to connect that fact with real life feelings or circumstances or the person I saw in front of me.
All that changed one very late night after our Junior/Senior formal. Shayla had given me permission to spend the night in her dorm room (our dorms had different curfew times and by spending the night in her room I’d be able to stay out later) while she spent the weekend with her mom. I got to her room around midnight and was hyped up from the fun of a college formal. Sleep was the furthest thing from my mind. So I looked at her book shelf. She had some photo albums and after looking through a couple that had pictures of our mutual friends I stumbled across what seemed to be a baby book.
And there they were. Pictures of Shayla and her baby. My friend looking like a warrior—so exhausted and empowered by the birth process. A precious baby girl who looked perfect in every way. Pictures of her adoptive parents beaming at their newfound happiness. Documented in this book was the name given to this little girl at her birth and the name her adoptive parents then bestowed on her. Tiny footprints. Hospital bracelets. I was mesmerized.
I felt so guilty for betraying Shayla’s privacy, but I couldn’t look away. Here were the real emotions and the real cost of adoption in front of me long before I knew how my life would someday be touched by another birthmother’s sacrifice. That adoption changed the course of a lot of lives and it wasn’t until that moment I pictured what my friend gave up to have the life that was best for her and best for her daughter. And Shayla became my hero all over again.
I tell you all that to say that I should have been much more prepared to admire and respect birthmoms and the process they go through. With all of the love I had for my friend, I still found it really hard to deal with the reality of my child having an original mother.
Our first attempt at adoption came through an agency that offered a domestic infant adoption program. As part of our packet of paperwork we’d have to fill out a “Dear Birthmom” letter. I was struggling through the hardest emotions of infertility grief and I just couldn’t make myself prostrate before these young, pregnant girls to vie for their approval. I read “Dear Birthmom” example letters and they made me so angry. I have to tell you how amazing and wonderful and courageous you are just because you have a functional body and chose to do unwise things with it? At the time it seemed so unfair. It took me a lot of drafts of that letter before I felt I had written something that was both respectful of the potential sacrifice of this woman and was also honest. And we never got picked.
During this process we were doing our group home work and were working with children who came from some troubled families. I loved the mothers of my boys and had good relationships with most of them, but also felt frustration for their kids who weren’t able to have permanency. They couldn’t go back to unsafe home situations, but they couldn’t stay with us forever either. Again, I was feeling moved to understand the precious heart of a mom who looks at her situation and realizes as much as she may want to try and parent, her child needs to be somewhere safe and consistent.
So after having no movement with domestic infant adoption, we decided to do international adoption. While we were in Liberia we had a chance to speak with our son’s relative (which is a very broad term in Liberia). I felt so frustrated with my inability to understand his Liberian English. I felt this pressure to learn everything, know everything about my child’s first family. I was responsible for remembering and carrying that information until the day I could safely pass it along to my son as his rightful heritage.
And as my days as a new mom turned into weeks and then months, my thoughts began to fixate around a woman who must have the same deep brown eyes as my son. I wondered about her and worried about her and prayed for her. I wondered how she had carried on with her life once this little one was gone. I knew how passionately I felt about him and how he was the most perfect baby ever placed on the earth—how could she have known him and then left him? What kind of desperation could cause that?
As I worked through those feelings I had a friend from church tell me a something surprising—she had placed a child for adoption when she was in high school. Rebecca was (is!) beautiful, smart, hilarious, a great mom to her three kids, a faithful wife, a lover of God. It took me a minute to process this new piece of information with who I knew her to be. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to thank her for her gift. I think I did both of those things, but in the jumble of emotions I had in that moment, I’m really not sure what I did. It helped me to know that she had peace about her decision, although her love for her daughter continued long beyond the pregnancy and birth process they shared. She told me she had her daughter’s picture up at home where her other kids could see it so she was an open part of conversation. I loved that.
When we wanted to adopt again we decided to try domestic infant adoption a second time. I felt so much more comfortable with having an open relationship with a birthmother now that I understood how my love for my son travelled back up his family tree and consumed every relative in its path. I also felt confident enough in my mothering skills that some of the competitive feelings I had about having to deal with a birthmom had faded away.
We went ahead and got our foster license so we could care for kids while we waited to be matched with a birthmom, but God had other plans. Our next two adoptions instead took place out of the foster care system. This has been another turn in our thoughts about birthparents. We have had a chance to develop relationships with our kids’ families and we’ve watched them battle their demons. It has brought us a sadness we didn’t anticipate as we’ve very clearly seen how our gain has been a huge loss to someone else.
I don’t feel guilt about our adoptions. We were in the unique position of watching two of our children’s birth families try to parent and ultimately decide they were not able to care for their kids. It was heartbreaking, but it also had nothing to do with us. And it doesn’t change the kind of love we have for them. We did our best as foster parents to keep the kids safe and healthy until their biological families were able to parent them again, but that day never came in spite of the best efforts of caseworkers, lawyers, judges, and mentors. We are blessed to have a relationship with one of our birthmoms and she has been very kind and supportive of us as a family. It is my honor and joy to share the triumphs of our child with her. Who else would be as proud as I am?
So now that you know the history of our birthparent relationships, what does all that mean? I’ll give you a list of the realities of the adoptive parent/birthparent relationship in an upcoming post. And tomorrow you’ll hear Shayla and Rebecca’s stories of adoption.
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