Since I started sharing my story and opening up about Charlie and my relationship, I have been able to have a lot of great conversations with friends and even people I have just met about it. While I know that open adoption is a relatively new concept, and talking about placing your child with two other people to care for her is a little bit uncomfortable to talk about, I just want to educate you on what NOT to say to people involved with adoption.
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There seems to still be this stigma related with adoption that I just cannot tolerate and I need to make myself very clear: The reason I placed Charlie with her adoptive parents was NOT because I didn't want her. If I hear anyone ever say that moms give their children up because they didn't want them, I will seriously go ballistic on you. What would be even worse would be to hear someone tell a child that their parents didn't want them and that's why they are adopted.
PEOPLE: ARE YOU KIDDING ME???!!!!
I want Charlie so bad it breaks my heart every day. I LOVE her more than she will possibly know...at least not until she has children of her own. That is the only way she could understand the love a mother has for her children. The idea of letting her go to these other parents was heart breaking, but I knew that it was the right thing. I wanted her to have all that they could offer her. I couldn't give her a father, a home, stability, etc. What is amazing is that the things that I could offer her, like love, grace, advice, cuddles...I still get to give her those things. She will always get that from me. So please-don't question my desire to "keep" her.
I did keep her when I chose to give her life.
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Another thing that bothers me is the wording that is given to adoption. I did not "give her up." I placed her with two parents who will be adopting her. I literally chose these two human beings for her. I did not make that choice lightly and I have no regrets about the parents I gave to her. I love them so much and they love her and I just as much.
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One question that is, to me, a silly question....it almost makes me laugh, actually: Was it hard?
Was it hard? Um. YES. It was hard. It was hard for everyone in my family. It still is hard. It's even hard for the adoptive parents. They struggle with feelings of guilt, like they took this child away from me. There will be hard parts of this whole thing for our entire lives. There is no doubt that adoption, from all aspects, is hard. OBVIOUSLY. I just pray that God will grant all of us enough love and grace for each other so that we can move through these "hard" moments and continue to do everything that is in the best interest of Charlie. She was not hard. She was the best part of all of this.
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Finally, one thing I wish had never happened to me was an encounter with a complete stranger while I was still pregnant with Charlie. I was maybe 25 weeks along at this point. I was still working at Lane Bryant and was helping a customer in her dressing room when we realized we were both pregnant. It was exciting at first because we could share stories about how our pregnancies were going, but when I started talking about how I was making an adoption plan for her, she decided she would offer me some "woman to woman" advice. What she said next will forever haunt me and it still makes me sick. She told me that she once found herself with an unplanned pregnancy a couple of years ago. She didn't find out until she was about 20 weeks along, and she thought about keeping it, but ended up googling ways to force a miscarriage. She gave me the specifics of how to do it and suggested that I do the same because doing adoption would be so much harder. As she was speaking to me, I literally felt myself getting woozy, light headed, sweaty and most of all, nauseous. I had to run to the bathroom to make it to a toilet in time.
Was this lady for real?! She just told me how to kill my child. The child that I had just been to the doctor to see. The child I had picked a name for. The child I was already madly in love with.
So for those of you who think you may know what's "best" for women who find themselves with an unexpected pregnancy, don't even start. If you support a woman's choice to do what she wants with her body, then let her make her own choices.
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Well that pretty much sums it up....if I come across anything else, I'll be sure to add it to this blog.
Basically, a good rule of thumb when talking about adoption is to do so in love. Let your words be spoken with a positive spirit because it deserves to be a positive occasion. Adoption is beautiful. Really, really beautiful. Lets start to make it that way.
xoxo
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