Open Adoption - an original mother's perspective

[sylvie]

This young woman surrendered her newborn son for adoption in 2012, when she was 23.
She is based in the U.S. where adoption is a huge and sophisticated business.
However, I recognised very well much of the rawness of her feelings.
This experience is rarely written about, but I thought it might be useful, especially for adopted people, to see into the mind of someone who apparently chose to give her baby up for adoption.
I hope it's helpful.

http://everyoneactdead.wordpress.com/about/

[ladyarcher70]

I started to read this, but soon gave up as I find it unbearably painful........and if I feel like that, just reading it, and have never had it happen to me.......how on earth do those whose children are gone stay sane...

.... another thing that I find very difficult is that I know from other birth family members, and a friend of my birth mother, how much I was loved by my b.mother and b.father, and b.grandfather....... yet my b.mother was forced to give me up, and my b.father was not given any choice as it all happened when he was posted elsewhere in the war......

...given that she already knew what it was like to lose the three children from her marriage who were taken from her and kept by her husband,............ and lost myself and my full sister who was still a babe in arms to adoption........ our b.mother then had a son that she gave up to adoption as well, then another son whom she managed to sort of keep, by having him fostered for a while......she also had another daughter from her much later second marriage.......

..given her experiences... how could she take the chance - I won't put it more coarsely than that - take the chance of becoming pregnant again, having already 'lost' five children......obviously in the 1940/early 50s the safest form of birth control was abstinence ......... I know that she had to take live in housekeeping jobs............so it could well be that she had to submit or lose her job and the roof over her head .....there are men like that, one cannot be naïve.......and it is likely that she would find it hard to get a job, and somewhere to live if she was in an area where she was known as a 'scarlet woman' ....maybe she was past caring what happened to her, or maybe she was trying to replace the children she had lost..........who knows .........I have not walked in her shoes, though I know about some of her journey ........I don't judge her, only weep for her ............

LA70
born 1944 - adopted 1946

[sylvie]

I think your mother would love how you hold her so tenderly and with such understanding and kindness in your heart LadyArcher. I hope you don't mind me saying that, but I do think that. And frankly, I doubt anyone else's heart would matter as much to her as yours. I think it's where she'd most want to be.

The blog I posted is heart-wrenching I know, but I wanted to post it to give a glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of someone who has given their baby up for adoption. In the hope that it will replace some of the myths (eg. she didn't care/ I didn't matter/ etc) that adopted people often have about their first mothers.

I recognise her pain very well, and still sometimes feel its sharpness over three decades later. But that's a reflection of just how important and how much my son means to me, and did from before he was born.

[ladyarcher70]

Thank you Sylvie

I think that the 'signing over' thing is, to me, particularly pointed up due to the fact that today I have spent three hours cwytching - Welsh for cuddling - my newborn latest grandchild........just a day and a half old ..........and the first time we had seen her as our daughter and son-in-law had to go all the way to Carmarthen to have her........our local hospital only does births that are happening too quickly for the hour and a half it takes to drive to Carmarthen... the other alternative is Abergavenny, also an hour and a half, and which is not a nice journey on a very twisty road.....Hereford has an ok road, but is still an hour away, and of course is in England, and they wanted baby to be 'proper Welsh'.

Sitting nursing little Eila I could not help wondering how on earth a grandparent can contemplate losing a grandchild to adoption ...... they would surely walk through fire to help their daughter keep a baby.....it is incomprehensible to me....... I do also know that my grandfather was very distressed to lose me, and in fact managed to turn up at my a.parents' house hoping to see me......and was turned away by my a.mother.........my grandmother was already dead, and grandfather lived with my b.mother during the war ............ that poor old man...........to be sent away like an 'un-desirable',................ because I am pretty sure that is how my a.mother would have spoken to him.

LA70

[sylvie]

Congratulatons LA, how lovely to cuddle your new grandchild.

No, I don't know how grandparents can allow a child to be lost from the family through adoption. My mother claims that she saw my son as her grandson but I find that very difficult to believe since she was instrumental in pressurising me to give him up. She also says she thought adoption would be best for both of us, and I believe she could have thought that since everyone back then did. My father did nothing to help me or my son.

The tentacles of adoption reach alsorts of unexpected places. I am a grandmother now too, but not permitted to be at any of my little grandson's birthday parties as his a-grandmother doesn't want me to be. She refuses to acknowledge me as a grandmother, though bequeaths this title to one of his parent's father's second wife.

Enjoy the untrammelled cuddles with your darling grandchild. That is one thing I have never known - what it feels like to cuddle a newborn baby that I am related to, without the background anxiety that I am not really allowed to, that the permission will be withdrawn at any time, and that I must not get too attached as a result. I would absolutely love to just sit back with an infant relative in my arms, and gaze into his or her little face, and think 'I love you'. It would be such a luxury to be able to do so.

So I will enjoy your experience vicariously, if you don't mind!

Ah cwtch - I know that word. Great word.