a misunderstanding

There are occasionally (rarely if I can help it) days when I daydream about how life would have been had I kept my son; how different it would be. This is one of those days.

I've been in Virginia for nearly a month visiting family and friends whom I have not seen in a year. Within this year I've done a LOT of processing: crying, reading, crying, writing, crying, spilling. Most of this process is to come to terms with what has happened--what I cannot change. Then, out of the blue, this subject pops up in such a way that makes me realize how bizarre and unnatural it is, and I can't help but dream of how it could have, no, SHOULD have been.

Today I was texting a friend about meeting on Saturday in a nearby town for a day at the theme park. He suggested we plan to go back to my parents' home afterward to "meet the rugrat." "Whose rugrat?" I questioned. "Yours," he specified. My heart skipped a beat. I know I haven't seen him in four years, but he HAD to have known the outcome of my pregnancy. Did he really think that I've been an active mom for three whole years? Apparently, he did. So I clarified, and he was appalled. He apologized, and I brushed it off.

But it got me thinking what he must have believed I was doing these past few years if I were a single mom: sleepless nights, focusing on raising my family, studying child development and alternative early education, occasionally taking a course here and there to eventually finish my degree, attempting to be a part-time professional, moving across the country with the man who I entrusted to be the father of my child[ren], being devastated when the relationship didn't work out... oh wait... that IS what I've been doing these past three years. The only difference is that I don't have my son.

Life isn't much different than how it would have turned out had I kept him. Similar struggles, similar outcome. But instead of having my little bundle of joy--the reason to live through the struggles--I have no one. I don't have memories of his first steps or his first words, I don't have his unconditional love and admiration, nor do I have the brilliant beautiful boy (that everyone says he's turned out to be) to be proud of.

So what was the point?

on having other children

My Little Man,

I never was good at spending time by myself. For as long as I can remember, I was an extrovert, a care-giver, and I really didn't like being alone... ever. There are certain emotions people end up having to face when they spend time alone and I had always preferred to avoid those thoughts and feelings.

Well if there is anything that moving out has given me plenty of: it's time to myself.

And that has made me confront a lot of things: memories, feelings, dreams---and their corresponding fears.

The truth is: I'm getting to the point in my life that I want to have a child, but I'm terrified you'll resent me for that.

I only gave birth to you and made the choice to give you away just a little more than three years ago! I haven't accomplished anything else that my family wished I would before I had children (finishing my degree was one of the main "reasons" my mother encouraged adoption) and I'm single; but I realize all that is supererogatory in a way. Committed partnerships can be great, but not necessary for being a great mother. I'm now have much more sustained happiness and a healthy, focused solidarity alone than I ever had with a man.

I've thought about the possibility of foster care (specifically taking in a child with autism to guide them through reversal/recovery), but that may make matters worse--would I be setting myself up for emotional breakdowns every time the child would go back to his natural parent or be adopted by someone else? But then again it may be good for me....

I think, more than anything, I crave motherhood because I know what I'm missing.

...but then my thoughts return to you, and I think about the possibility of it hurting your feelings when I have other children with whom I DO get to spend all my time, and it breaks my heart.

I hope you will be able to forgive me.

Mama Anne

"Not So Simple Math" New York Times article on Open Adoption

To My Family,

This NY Times article was sent to me by a therapist I know, who is also a birthmother.

It took me a week to find the moment to be present and centered enough to read it, and I'm glad I waited because there's nothing that rocks my world more than to hear such private and unspoken emotions written SO EXACTLY and eloquently by someone else.

I send it to you because I now have the strength to ASK those I love the most to TRY to better understand. Please take the time to read it, I think it [could be] very insightful.

As always, with Love and Peace,

Anne

Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math
By AMY SEEK

Published: May 7, 2010

I WANTED my son to become the kind of person who appreciates the beauty of the world around him, so I smiled when, at 6, he asked to borrow my camera in case he saw “something beautiful.”

We were taking a walk in the woods outside Boston, and following behind him I was surprised by how much he moved like his father. We spent that afternoon showing each other icicles and hollow trees, breaking frozen patterns in the river ice, inching too close to the water to get a better view of the bridge above.

When we arrived home, Ben said that the reason he wanted to go for a walk was to spend time with me. It had been three months since I last saw him. I smiled sheepishly and stepped into the living room, where the woman who had adopted him six years earlier sat reading the newspaper.

I spent the evening chatting with her while avoiding direct interaction with Ben for fear I’d show too much affection, or too little. Open adoption is an awkward choreography; I am offered a place at the table, but I am not sure where to sit. I don’t know how to be any kind of mother, much less one who surrendered her child but is back to help build a Lego castle.

It is a far cry from the moment he was born, when my 23-year-old body seemed to know exactly what to do, when I suddenly and surprisingly wanted nothing more than to admire him nursing at my breast. When, after a drugless labor, my surging hormones helped me to forget that I was a college student, that I lived in Cincinnati, that I was passionate about architecture. During those days I was roused by the slightest sound of his lips smacking, innocent newborn desire that offered my deepest fulfillment.

In the months before I gave birth, when my boyfriend and I were just getting to know the couple we had chosen, I was able to comprehend the coming exchange only on the most theoretical of levels, but it seemed like gentle math: Girl with child she can’t keep plus woman who wants but can’t have child; balance the equation, and both parties become whole again.

During those months, my son’s mother, Holly, observed that birth mothers have to accomplish in one day the monumental task of letting go that most parents have 18 years to figure out. Days after his birth, when I struggled with letting go, Holly sat with me and cried — for the children she never got to have, for the fact the adoption would bring her joy while causing me pain, and out of fear that she had already grown to love a child I might not give her.

I decided to let her take him for a night, to see if I could handle it. She drove him to Dayton, Ohio, where she was staying with family, then called and asked: “Do you want him back? I’ll bring him right now.”

Meanwhile, the men in our lives stood by and hoped for the best. My boyfriend supported the adoption, and though we had broken up, he was there to help me through my pregnancy. We had met in architecture school, never suspecting that two years later we would be forever joined as birth parents, composing 111 questions to ask strangers about the most intimate details of their lives.

We had a list of qualities we wanted in a couple — basically ourselves, 10 years older. But when we met the couple we would choose, our list fell by the wayside, replaced by an overwhelming intuition that we could trust them.

I signed the papers on a hot August day in 2000, sitting at a large conference table with my sister, my son’s adoptive parents and agents from Catholic Social Services. I’d sat there several times before but hadn’t yet been able to say the words to relinquish all rights to my son. Each time I was left alone to think and, hours later, was sent home with him.

My ex was not there; the birth had made me a different person, and we couldn’t pretend that our losses would be the same. My sister had come from China, where she was teaching; she promised that if I kept him, she would move home and help. Her face was glazed in tears, but she stared intently at me as I prepared to sign the papers, as if to assure herself I knew what I was doing.

My pen rested at the intersection of two vastly different futures, and I struggled to see into the distance of each. It did not seem that a gesture as small as scribbling my name had the power to set me down one path while turning the other, its entire landscape, to dust. It was such a small gesture, but it was the first sketch of my life without a son.

One of the exercises I was given in adoption counseling was to envision the hours immediately after the adoption. What would I do after signing the papers? Pick up the towels that had been tossed in the corner when my water broke? Pack up the extra blankets I’d been given by the hospital workers who touched my shoulder and prayed aloud that I would find the courage to keep my son?

I had spent my entire life without a child, but I was newly born that night, too, and my old self disappeared. I could no longer imagine how a mother could give up a child and live. Adoption was not simple math; a new mother cannot know the value of the thing she subtracts. It is only through time — when my son turned 4, and I was 27; when he turned 6, and I was 29; when he turns 10 this year, and I am 33, and ready for children — that I begin to understand the magnitude of what I lost, and that it is growing.

The comfort is seeing my son with his family, whom I can no longer imagine him or myself without. He is an earnest child who seems to kick hard to keep his chin above water in the world, but his mother has a certain lack of sympathy that is good for him. When he wants to retreat into his own head, she pulls him back into the refuge of his family and makes him smile. I am ever astounded that I was able to see in her something that would still feel so right so many years later.

The greatest proof of her commitment to openness is that she talks about me when I’m not there. When my son was a baby, I was surprised that he always remembered me, even after long stretches when I couldn’t visit. When he was 7 and we were playing a computer game, he told me his password was “Cincinnati” because his mother had told him he was born there. I know that Holly represents me to my son in my absence and always encourages him to love me.

Holly jokes that with open adoption, at least you know what the birth mother is doing, that she’s busy at school and not conceiving a plot to steal her child back. It’s not so with closed adoptions; the birth mother is powerfully absent. But an open process forces an adoptive parent to confront the pain that adoption is built on. And openness for Holly does not mean merely letting the birth mother know about her child; it means cultivating a real love between birth parents and child. This requires exceptional commitment, which may be why some open adoptions become closed in the end.

I LOVE Holly for sharing such things with me, sentiments that show she is devoted to our relationship — and not because it is easy for her. And I have told her that a pivotal point in my grief was the moment I was able to say aloud that I wanted my son back, though I knew it was impossible — when I realized that his adoption had been both my greatest accomplishment and deepest regret.

And we continually redefine this relationship. I hide certain exchanges, like the time he was 4 and crawled into my arms and said, “Amy, pretend I’m your baby.”

I made sure no one was looking before I indulged his request, my entire body shuddering at the chance to hold him so close for the first time since birth. I suspect Holly knows about these moments, and when I visit she tries to help by sending me off with my son for walks in the woods, where we can freely explore my place in his life.

When I returned home to New York after my visit, I looked at the pictures Ben had taken with my camera: fragments of arms and legs, blurry close-ups of leaves caught in ice, too many spinning forest skies. Evidence to me that although he has his father’s distinctive gait, he shares my need to grasp and hold on to beautiful things, to document and to somehow preserve them forever — things he can’t possibly keep.

---

NYT

---
Amy Seek is a landscape architect who works on community food projects in New York City.

Letter to Ryder: Mothers' Days without him

Ryder,

I'd give my life right now if it meant that the last 24 hours of it could be with you, as mother and son.

The first Mothers' Day without you I happened to be in San Diego. I flew here to see friends on my way up to San Francisco for a job interview at a pre-school for children with autism. That morning your 'Mom' actually called to say Happy Mothers' Day, and to see how I was. I suppose because technically your firstfather and I were still living together (although honestly no longer in love with each other) I had a sense of stability; because I was traveling, I was distracted; and because she woke me up that morning with that thoughtful call, it started my day off right.

The second Mothers' day without you I was... actually in San Diego! My ex and I flew here to check out housing options because he had recently been ordered to take the surgical residency program in San Diego. So once again, the day went pretty smoothly because I was very happy in my relationship with a strong man to support me and we were traveling. But that day I didn't hear from your 'parents'. Around four o'clock Mountain time I finally called them and, well, you know the story from a previous letter: your 'Dad' answered and although I made it clear that I called to wish your 'Mom' a Happy Mothers' Day, he never handed the phone to her.

This year, my life fell apart. Again. I happen to be in San Diego, again, during this holiday; but this year I face the harsh pain these holidays entail for firstmoms like me. I have no longer have a strong man to wrap his arms around me when I cry because I miss you. I'm nearly three thousand miles away from my family and your birthfather, so the most they can do is wish me the best. I don't have you, or stability, or a place to call home. I've become a wanderer, alone and without my child. This year, I have not heard from you 'parents' at all.  I sent them a card a few days ago, but certainly not early enough that they realize the polite thing to do would be to send one back to me, maybe even with a few photos of your precious face. Actually I haven't heard from them in four months, when your 'Mom' quickly "texted" me three photos of you, without even the decency to say "hello." And before that it was a postcard with your family around Santa, one of those mass mailings they love to do.

I am appreciative of the photos, believe me, I live by them! I "hide" them in random places where I'm likely to "find" them often: as a bookmark in whatever I'm reading, in my planner, in a purse I don't use that often, etc. They sustain me. Your face is my "happy place" I return to for just a few seconds a day to clear my mind and feel like I've done something good in my life. I can NEVER get enough of your photos. [Which is why I got so upset over your adoptive grandparents saying they "lost" all the photos of our day together when you turned two.]

However, I will say there is one catastrophic downside to only getting to see new pictures of you every four to six months. It elaborates how much time I'm missing. It's hard to see and appreciate how a child grows when you see them every day. See them a couple times a year, however, and it's shocking. I still remember exactly how your toes looked at three days old. At this rate, by the tenth time I see you, your feet will be bigger than mine. It's startling to think of things in that way. It's like fast forwarding time. It's unnatural. I'm a fool for choosing this life.

So it's even harder to get photos only a couple times a year, especially these days when it takes less than ten seconds to pose, take, and send a photo to anyone of your choice. Sometimes I sit down and write an email to your 'Mom' to ask, "How often do you send photos of Ryder to your mother that you don't send to me???" And then hold down the top right key on my laptop and watch as the cursor slowly skips in a backwards direction deleting each letter, each word, until only the blank white box remains.

One of these days I will ask. One of these days I will remember that your healthy relationship with your natural mother is more important than they can conceive, and I will convince them that this healthy relationship begins with mutual trust and sharing of precious moments between your parents. All four of them.

So until I am blessed with an other snap shot of your handsome face, I will be waiting, dreaming of how much it's changed since the last time I saw it.

I miss you so much, my Love.

I really would give anything to spend this day with you.

Eternally,

Your Mama Anne

grief

A whole lot of nothing.

Emptiness.

So from where do the tears fall?

I lost the most beautiful thing that would ever happen to me.

I thought I would die of the grief.

I didn't.

I fell in love.

I had hopes and dreams of filling that emptiness with another child's laughter,

because I couldn't hear Ryder's.

I found a man who will make a great father.

I adored him. He discarded me.

I think I am going to die of this grief.

How much love can a person lose?

Birthmothers' Day

In the adoption awareness community, the Saturday before Mother's Day has become known as Birthmothers' Day.

It's a day to...

...I don't know

It's the day before one of the hardest days of the year for me. It's a day to grieve. A day to sit and wonder about how many more years it be until I hear my son say, "Happy Mothers' Day." Hell, it's a time to sit and wonder about how many more years until his adopting parents would even say that. Last year I called them to say 'Happy Mothers' Day' to his adoptive mother, and his adoptive father didn't even put her on the phone so I could say it directly to her. After a few minutes of small talk (that I thought was meant to fill the silence while he went to tell her to pick up the phone), I finally got the metamessage, wrapped up the conversation, and said goodbye.

I gave life to their son. Do they honestly think it would be inappropriate or unnecessary to extend best wishes on such a day? On one hand, no amount of gratitude expressed by them would be sufficient, so I understand why they don't call just to say, "Thank you for such a precious little boy!" [And he really is a precious little boy.] But society created holidays for a reason: to take at least ONE opportunity per year to show love for specific groups of people that make the world go 'round. Like Moms. After all, they would not have a son if I didn't exist in their life.

Is that too much to ask?

My greatest fear

One of my favorite inspirational quotes was one shared with me by my sister Natalie, written by Marianne Williamson:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

I couldn't agree more with her that it iscompletely terrifying to allow yourself to become the best you can be when you see others struggling to just BE. Time and time again I have sacrificed my career or put my education on hold for the men I love. I don't blame them, I blame myself for giving everything to them. For putting their happiness before my own. I was ignoring my own soul's beauty and ability to be great, because I believed in them and wanted them to be great.

By doing that, I hurt them. I hurt all of you. By not allowing myself to be the beautiful, passionate, out-going, insanely determined and independent woman I once was, I have hurt my community--and within it hundreds of children--by NOT being ready and available to help them. Economists say that an unearned dollar is a lost dollar: for every month longer I take to complete my degree and certifications, there is less opportunity to help others.

When I fell in love with a surgeon, I let my fear of our opposing philosophies [regarding health and healing] stand in the way of my interests in alternative medicine, specifically how it can reverse autism. I was terrified that my theories would conflict so greatly with his education that I was putting our relationship at risk by pursuing alternatives to his ingrained "Experimental-Based Medicine!" Recently I got over it and realized: by feeling the need to justify the physiological reasons for such "alternative" therapies to HIM, I was further educating myself on the subject. I never got the chance to share with him how much I've learned, but now I'm definitely more educated on the subject because of it.

IT SHOULDN'T HAVE TAKEN SUCH REASONS. My mistake was not pursuing what I wanted; it shouldn't have mattered what he thought. It doesn't matter. I don't think any less of him even though I believe most surgeries are unnecessary (that's not just a personal opinion, it's the result of my personal studies pertaining to survival rates of cardiac surgery patients and the skyrocketing rates of procedures like C-sections and hysterectomies/vasectomies)! So why did I worry he'd think less of me for believing in progressive therapies? Because it is my light, not my darkness, that most frightens me.
Then, as if God/Creator/Gaea/Universal Being (whatever you want to call Her) couldn't stand seeing my weak dependence and fear-driven life, She plucked the very focus of my Love. Now with no one in my arms, I HAVE to feel the emptiness inside of me. I HAVE to address it. I HAVE to fill it with my own strength and Love--for myself, my purpose, my reason to Be.

So that I can no longer serve just one man.

So that I will instead serve the World.