Parenthood
The ultimate awakening.
I know what you’re thinking.
Estranged from my birth mom. Adoptive mom dies by suicide.
I’ve thought it too, trust me.
What’s the common denominator?
Trauma.
Until I gave birth to my first child, I allowed myself to believe the fairy tale that birth mothers joyfully surrender their children to “better”, Christian homes, freely and without a glance back, moving on happily with their lives.
As if it never happened.
I know now that this is rarely true for birth parents. Certainly there are those who choose adoption, but most birth parents, birth mothers specifically, report that they would have chosen to parent their child if they had not been shamed or coerced, if their salvation hadn’t been tied to relinquishment, or if they had family support, financial resources, affordable housing, and so on. Regardless of the circumstances, a shared experience among nearly all birth parents is the experience of grief, regret, shame, guilt, or a combination of those emotions around relinquishment.
In a world that clings to the notion of weak women and strong men, that binary was imposed full force on both of the women who shaped me: the one who gave me life and the one who saved it. While the circumstances around my birth mother’s pregnancy are her story to tell, it is well documented what unwed pregnant girls and women faced in the Baby Scoop Era and on into the 1970s. Even now, construction of new maternity homes is on the rise across the US. This is largely in response to the overturn of Roe. These homes, like the Liberty Godparent Maternity Home*, will be ready to churn out healthy, mostly white, infants to a good home with lots of cash. These factors along with the shame imposed upon my mom for living through fertility issues and being unable to provide “biological” grandchildren, created a cycle of trauma for all of us.
Like any parent, I couldn’t fathom what a mother’s love could feel like until I became one. When my daughter was born, something ancient and unexplainable broke loose, rising up and out like it had been waiting my whole life to be born. I felt this in the shift from child to mother. For the first time in my life, holding a living, breathing part of me. My blood, revealed in the flesh of my child.
Another aspect was unearthed that day: my first conscious experience with relinquishment trauma.
Recently, over lunch with colleagues, conversation drifted from research into family. At one point, I shared how overwhelmed I felt at the level of sheer panic I experienced after my first was born. This fear that someone might take her from me was all over me, but I didn’t have the context to associate that anxiety with my own relinquishment trauma. This fear actually began during pregnancy, typically with me telling my husband: Whatever is happening with me at the hospital, stay with the baby. Don’t let her out of your sight.
Stay with the baby.
When the nurses offered to take the baby so I could rest, well-meaning friends and family encouraged me, saying, you won’t get any rest once you’re home!
Each time, we declined.
One day, about a week postpartum, my mom sat across the room, watching me doze off while snuggling my newborn on my chest. Once you’re asleep, she said, I’m going to get my time with that baby. You have hardly let me hold her!
She wasn’t being cruel, just matter-of-fact. But I could tell she was hurt by how unwilling I had been to share.
No, you won’t, I snapped, trying to stifle the tears. Please don’t take her from me while I’m asleep.
She looked stunned and came over to me, assured me she wouldn’t do that, and asked if I was “okay”, talked to me about the baby blues and postpartum. After a few minutes together she gently asked if she could hold the baby. Of course, I said yes. And of course, everything was fine.
As I shared this story over lunch, I noticed my friend, also adopted, staring in disbelief, eventually saying, I felt the exact same way! She described her experience - the anxiety, hyper-vigilance, the fear that somehow her child would be taken from her. We both assumed our experience was unique to us, something pathological or broken, not a shared experience among adopted people who become parents.
That fear, that so called irrationality? That was primal and it ran deep, creeping back to the surface after the birth of our second. Because babies do get taken. Every day. Some with permission. Many without.
I have heard many people ask, how on earth does a person give up their baby?
How do they survive it?
The story of my birth was told to me like this:
Several months prior to my birth, the doctor who would deliver me mentioned to my maternal grandparents that his golf buddy, my great-uncle, had a niece who was looking to adopt. It was a done deal.
My birth mother, late teens, was sitting at the dining table, helping prep Sunday supper when she went into labor. Hours later, she woke to dark skies. Night time. No baby. Unconscious for the birth, she never saw me.
Four days later, I was screaming in a courtroom in Gulfport, Mississippi, placed in my mother’s arms. Sick, inconsolable.
My dad tells the story of the ride home to my maternal grandparents’ house. Mom was holding me in her arms, belly to belly, when I pushed up on my feet and reared my head back, letting out a scream that earned me the nickname Rajun Cajun.
As we headed north, my birth mother, her sisters, her mother - everyone, was told in no uncertain terms, We will never speak of this again.
And they didn’t. It was the 70s. It was not negotiable.
Now, I think about all that was wrapped up in that scream. Sorrow. Sickness. Betrayal. Unfamiliarity. Fear. A cord, forever cut.
All of it.
*Check out Liberty Lost, a podcast about the Liberty Godparent Maternity Homes.
Yes having a baby brings up all the emotions you list. For me as relinquishing mother, the guilt and shame; for you as adopted person that emptiness your infant brain experienced culminating in the scream your family recall.
I didnt know what went wrong after I had my (second) baby; why I spiralled into depression. No psych person I consulted ever suggested it might be linked to the relinquishment fourteen years earlier. That was the 70s. Only in my twilight years have I understood what both I and the baby (you) actually survived.
Great writing, thank you for sharing 🙏🏻 So much of your experience resonates with me too. My first daughter was born by emergency c section and I stayed awake the whole night, holding her in my arms while she slept. Because I knew I had to watch her all the time. (I stopped using the morphine then !) She was 10 months old before I left her with anyone except me or her dad !