A Wall Against the Pain
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While adoption as it is today is not perfect, believe me when I tell you it has come a long way from the way it used to be. In a way, I envy the young birthmothers of today that they get the opportunity to make choices that young pregnant girls of my day never got to make.
I became pregnant at 15, in 1972. People were becoming just a little more accepting of alternative choices regarding unwed pregnancies, but only just barely. When my parents confronted me about being pregnant, I was 5 months pregnant already and it was made very clear that there were no choices, the decision had been made for me. Adoption was my only option. Could I have pressed the issue and forced them to see another way, the option of me keeping my baby? That is something I will never know and to be honest, I just can't consider. I was an obedient kid, even if I did find myself in trouble. If my daddy said I was going to choose adoption, then that's the way it was going to be. You didn't argue with daddy.
A couple of months later, I was sent to a home for unwed mothers to finish out my pregnancy. I really want to stress something here. I was sent to an unwed mothers home. Now, they didn't set these homes up because just a few of us made the adoption decision. They had homes all over the country, sometimes more than one in a city, because in those days, if you were unwed and found yourself in that condition, going to an unwed mothers home is what you did. Period. You were hidden away from the public eye so no one would know, and families made up elaborate stories to cover up your absence.
Many mental health professionals today recognize that the birth mothers of yesteryear basically went through a "death" they were not allowed to grieve. We were to return to normal life and never speak of it again. Today, when feelings are repressed it is commonly known that unexpressed grief (pain) can easily become expressed as anger. I became angry at the world and hated everyone, including myself. Some birth mothers are unable to turn their anger anywhere but at the one person who deserves it the least, the adoptee. It's not to say that the birth parent is angry at the adoptee but at the life she was forced to live, the lies she was forced to tell.
I hear you say that you would never give up your child, that you would make it somehow. Unfortunately for those of us in my generation who would have kept our children, we weren't given other options. We were told our children needed a two-parent family. We were reminded that we had no way to support a child, and we weren't offered any assistance from our families or the state welfare programs. We had no choice.
Why am I writing this? I've read a few entries from adoptees wondering how their birth mother could make that decision. I'm writing to let you know that in those days 99% of us had no part in the decision. We didn't give up our children because they were unwanted or because it wasn't convenient to have a family just then. We did it because that is just what happened to girls who got pregnant. And then we spent the next 20 years or more silently grieving the loss of that child, living in the shame of having been "in trouble".
It breaks my heart every time I hear of a birth mother who has rejected her adult child, but I understand. I think she has become so accustomed to pushing away the pain, building a wall against the pain, that it is too much of a risk to her sanity, to open up and allow the feelings buried so deep, to flow. For myself, I would be the happiest woman in the world, if only my child, lost at birth, would have wanted to find me.
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