I Did Not Know

Throughout this post I am going to skip many parts. I have a method to my madness and eventually all of it will be told.

I was reading an infertility blog the other day and the author was talking about adoption. In her opinion she didn't see what the fuss was about with first mothers. These girls chose to give up their children so there was no pain involved, right? Then the author saw an interaction between a first mother, an adoptive mother and a new baby. The first mother was visibly upset. The author realized that with the choice to give up a child there can be pain. (At this point in time I prefer the term first mother to birth mother. We do much more than simply give birth.)

Growing up I did not especially like children or babies. My friends babysat as much as possible, talked about babies and children and generally acted like girls, I suppose. I didn't have a great mother-daughter bond with my mom, and I didn't feel especially liked as a child. I don't have any siblings, either. When I reached my teen years I thought I would go to college, eventually marry, and at some point have children because that is what a person did with her life. I wasn't looking forward to much beyond college and a career at that point.

When I found myself pregnant suddenly the option to have an abortion disappeared in my mind. I had friends that had abortions, I had taken a friend to get an abortion, and I believed (and still do) in choice. But my brain screamed, "This is a BABY" and so the option was never on the table. My on/off boyfriend and I were currently in the "off" mode (yeah, except for the occasional sex) and he was not interested in being a daddy. I was 19, living on my own and trying to figure out how to get back into school while working full-time. I was worried.

Worried about raising a baby in an environment where I resented him-because that was how I felt. Worried about shuttling him from daycare to babysitter-because that was how I lived. Besides, adoption is a win-win situation, right? Society tells us that babies get a loving home, the first mother goes back to her life, and everyone is happy. I went to a few different places to find answers, one place showed me videos of a fetus and cautioned against abortion. Killing babies is BAD. I didn't find them especially useful, and their scare tactics meant nothing to me. I didn't want an abortion. I wanted answers. I needed help.

I went to Planned Parenthood and a counselor talked with me. I told her what I wanted to do, and she told me that giving my baby up for adoption was a very difficult path. BAH! My life was a difficult path. I had an idea that being pregnant and giving birth was difficult, but giving up a baby that I didn't want or need? Not a big deal at all. I was doing GOOD! for other people! and it would all be roses and sunshine at the end.

I saw a counselor through this whole process. I knew her from previous fucked up shit in my life and trusted her completely. After it was all over she told me that her children were adopted, but she didn't want to sway my decision by telling me in the beginning. She didn't want me to make my choice to please her. I want to believe that as an adoptive mother she didn't know the other side of adoption. She did quote me statistics about first mothers getting pregnant again after the first year or two to replace the baby that they lost. I didn't understand it at the time. My logical brain thought that you gave your baby up and walked away. End of story, right?

I picked adoptive parents early and bonded with them right away. I began to think of my son as theirs, a package that I was simply holding onto until it was time for them to take it. It wasn't my baby, it was theirs. The pregnancy was easy, I was twenty years old and everything was going to be fine. I was doing the right thing for everyone.

Toward the end of my pregnancy things got a little weird in my head. I bonded with my son, something that I did not expect to do at all. I struggled through more than 24 hours of labor and his adoptive mother was right there at my side when he was born. I spent the day with him in the hospital, holding him and sharing him with friends that visited. My counselor came to check on me, to see how I was doing and to see my son. Finally, I gave him to his new parents and left the hospital.

My friends took turns staying the with me night and day. As long as there was someone there I mostly kept it together. I'm not good at falling apart in front of people. Growing up I learned that it was more painful to cry in front of someone that didn't give a shit than to cry alone. Eventually I was left alone to feel what I had bottled up inside, and the pain was beyond belief.

Recently a friend that is going through a divorce remarked that she did not know how I had gone through two divorces. I told her that divorce was not even close to the worst pain I had gone through in my life. My life has not been easy and I have been through a fuckton of trauma, but nothing has even come close to the horror of losing my son.

One might say, "But Sam, why didn't you just ask for him back. The adoption wasn't final." This is where my bond with the adoptive parents fucked me in the ass. I could not hurt them by taking away my son. I just couldn't. How could I put them through the same pain that was killing me? I had heard horror stories of selfish first mothers that backed out of adoptions. I didn't want to be that person.

I wish I could describe the pain in a way that anyone could understand. The only thing that kept me from directly killing myself was my previous experience with suicide. (You can find it here: part 1 part 2) For those of you that don't want to visit/revisit those posts, I have a Reader's Digest version: I was 15 and my boyfriend killed himself in my house while I was home. It was horrible and I vowed to never inflict that kind of pain on anyone. So I didn't. I was stuck, alive, and wishing I was dead.

Do you know what I wish now? I wish that someone would have told me that I could parent. That I would not be my mother. That I would love my child and I would make it work. I wish I knew about the bond between a mother and her child. I wish that someone would have told me that the pain of adoption would last my lifetime and that it would become the only thing in my life that I regret.