On Saturday I was attending a national history conference, enjoying myself as I was immersed in new knowledge from people far smarter than myself, when suddenly, like a punch to the gut, there she was. Smiling excitedly as she looked at her cake while her friends surrounded her, all full of a kind of joy and wonder that exists only in children, she was just about to blow out her candles.
My girl’s fifth birthday party. It caught me entirely off-guard, it was three days before her actual birthday, and it slammed into me like a freight train. The fact that, somehow, this girl had aged five years in a span of what really felt like an instant.
I still recall the night I went into labor with sharp clarity. The searing pain, the overwhelming fear, the anticipation. I will never forget her mother, her mother, holding my hands in the dark as the contractions grew stronger and she helped me breathe through them, whispering encouragement, prayers, and gratitude into my ear as we held on to one another. The sadness in her voice, apologies for the pain I was going through, and my rushed response, telling her how happy I was to do it for her. For her. Totally, entirely worth the pain, the fear, the loss. This was her daughter, whom she had waited so long to meet. She was just my girl.
When you go through the process of paperwork, they give you literature and stress how hard the absence is. They say especially the big years can be challenging, but every birthday will bring the pain. The memory of those months is attached permanently to the calendar and every year the pot is stirred with the swirling fall leaves and the memories become fresh again. Last week there was a dinner for birth mothers held in several cities that my adoption agent invited me to partake in, but unfortunately, my hectic schedule and my fear got the better of me. I’ve never spoken at length to other women like me, just read their letters, and I couldn’t bring myself to start at a time of year when I am always a little emotionally raw.
I couldn’t help but put myself there at a fifth birthday party, a mother to a five-year-old girl, and immediately, I recoiled. How much less happy, well groomed, fed, cared for, she would be. What a different, worse, lesser life, I could have given her. No bachelor’s degree on my wall, no master’s degree almost complete, no Ph.D. applications, no international travel or research for me. No swimming lessons, gymnastics’, singing, trips to the beach, to Disney, to family all over, no older brother, and constant want for her. She wants for nothing with the family I chose for her. She would have wanted for everything if I had kept her, having a childhood dangerously similar to my own, and me continuing the cycle rather than breaking it.
The reactions I get from people about my decision to give her up are a mixed bag. Most see it as the most selfless act, so noble, so graceful. A small few see it as entirely selfish- that I was a lazy mother, and rather than struggle on through the years without a decent job and depending on welfare and family, I took the easy way out and threw her away. In reality, my decision was for both selfish and unselfish reasons. Above all else, when I am being honest, I knew I would have resented her for preventing me from finishing school right away, for taking the life I wanted for myself and delaying it at least six years until she started school, and for being this obligation before I was ready to even care for myself. I also did it for her family. Getting to know them you can’t help but see how they were destined to have the children they do, and irresistible is the love and warmth that radiates from them. They were destined to have this girl. I was destined to give her to them.
Some women may shy away from this experience. Bury it deep inside and never discuss it, try to forget it happened and just move on. That is how they cope. But that is not how I ever could. Instead, I channeled my pain into work. I slog through the archives to uncover letters written by other women like me, who made this choice, who ask the same questions I do. “Is my child healthy?” “Please sir, tell me, is she walking yet?” “How is he getting on? I hope he is not a nuisance to anyone” “Please may I see her soon?” These women, long dead, left in existence only by the words scrawled upon whatever paper they could find, are brought to me, flesh and blood, in a rush of color and sound as I decipher their scrawled pleas for news. Locked into strict rules and expectations, they strove to do whatever they could to be worthy of the official response about their baby, who they loved just as I love mine. They would often increase their writings around the fifth birthday when they knew the child would be moved back from the countryside into town and it was possible to catch a glance of them if they could get into good enough graces with the administration. I, on the other hand, stay painfully silent. Far away and so happy, I hate to bother that family I helped to create. My role is technically complete, and I never feel as though they deserve to have this awkward piece, this dead weight, bother their peace. Pictures are regularly sent, and that’s more than the women I study ever got and much more than I feel I deserve at times. I wish the ghost women I work with could have communicated with the ease I often ignore and take for granted, and on their behalf, I sometimes feel guilty for shying away from this family that I know would be happy to talk to me because of my own issues of self-worth.
The last time I saw them was over a year ago. They were driving through my hometown and stopped for lunch to catch up a little. It was challenging if I am honest. This foreign creature who I unmistakably helped create (a near-exact miniature), did not know me at all, and was interested in others she was surrounded by because they were better with children. I have no experience, expertise, or ease around children at all, I have never been around them, and I am too withdrawn to put myself out there, grab the child, and be maternal when there are other, more qualified and comfortable people around. I felt more comfortable watching her than interacting with her. A neutral observer, rather than the person irrevocably attached to her entrance to this world. I have not seen her nearly as much as I have wanted, but whether that is because I am too afraid to ask, or if they don’t want to be bothered, the answer is clear. I am so incredibly afraid of ruining my relationship with her family, to disappoint, disgust, to make them send me from them forever, that I would rather wait for them to reach out first, with the gift of pictures and occasional updates, than to put myself in their way or bother them.
So, on Saturday, as the images of her fifth birthday party were sent, a punch to the gut, I could not help but have my annual imagining of being her mother, of keeping her, and as always, I came to the same conclusion. I have never been more sure of a decision in my life, and yearly, I know I made the right choice for all parties involved. To see her pigtailed smile, her ecstatic friends surrounding her, her brother’s arm around her, her parents’ glee at how she’s grown and bloomed in their lives, I can live in the absolute certainty that I gave her the gift of a family, a childhood, and a life far better than what I could have given her, and if I am honest, one I am a little jealous of. Instead of a birthday party, I sat in conference rooms in a hotel in Denver, taking copious notes, and trying to work up the courage to speak to someone who could be my advising professor for the Ph.D. I hope to embark on soon. I unfortunately never worked up said courage. I am far more afraid of trying to get accepted to the program I want to be in and starting on these enormous goals I set for myself than I ever was about the adoption. I am so unashamed of my experience. If you talk to me for longer than twenty minutes, it will probably come up in some way or another, which may make some people uncomfortable, but those aren’t the people I want to be around anyway. This choice I made, the path I chose, drastically altered my life and if I pretend it didn’t, then what was the point of it all? No, it is not the only thing that defines who I am, and if I am honest I can go entire days without even thinking of her once. But this chapter in my book mattered a lot. And I am proud of it, truthfully. I love that little family so very much and it gives me so much joy to see them all together.
The thing about being a birthmother is there is just a lot of happy/sad. Or rather sad/happy, to be more accurate. A lot of times I am initially upset about something, a knee-jerk reaction that my brain corrects when I stop to really think about it. At first, tears stung my eyes at her donut party and how big she had gotten, just as they had done when her first day of school pictures had when they reached me through the magic of technology. But the more I thought about it, the more I tried on the mantle of her mother, the more I wanted to rip it off, give it back to the woman I had so joyfully presented it to five years ago, and return to the title of birth mother, the unmother, the biologic life-giver, but not the caregiver she depended on, because I knew in my bones that it wasn’t who I was supposed to be to that girl, and I could not have done nearly the job the woman who kisses her goodnight does. So today, I am going to be a little sad at the absence, and then I am going to incredibly joyful over the village that loves that girl, and the family she belongs to. And then I am going to treat myself to some birthday cake.
