e-mail
I’ve been having some email conversations with a few wonderful birth mothers, all from various stages in their journey and from different eras of adoption. I needed to ask a few questions about birth parents and fear.
1. Something awful will happen to our child. As birth parents, we either decide or are told that our child will be in better care with another family. We trust that or force ourselves to trust that idea. The truth is that sometimes bad things happen even in adoptive families. Abuse and death don’t skip over a household just because they have adopted. Many of the mothers I talked to held this fear closely.
2. Their child will be irreparably angry. This is not just a fear from closed adoption birth mothers who fear that the secrecy and length of silence will create angry feelings on behalf of their relinquished child. Mothers in open adoptions also fear the potential for anger. Most of the birth mothers I spoke with said that they understood the reasons for the anger and would be accepting but the fear still sat in the pit of their stomachs.
3. Their child will want nothing to do with them. Not even for angry reasons, a majority of the birth mothers held the fear that their adult child would want nothing to do with them. This was a universal fear, encompassing both birth mothers from closed and open adoptions.
4. Their adoption would be closed. This was obviously a fear of mothers from the open adoption era. Over half of the mothers I spoke with were concerned that their adoptions would be closed and that they would have no way to contact their child. The other fear embedded with this one was that the adoptive parents wouldn’t be truthful about who closed the adoption and that the child would become angry with the birth parent for “walking away.”
5. Their child would never be told he was adopted. This was mainly a fear with mothers from the closed adoption era, though mothers with less open adoptions (letters only) also held this fear.
I will be talking about some of these fears over the next few weeks. My hope is that by discussing these fears, we remove a little bit of their power. I don’t think any birth mother will be able to read one of these posts and magically let go of their fear but, at the same time, it is empowering to know that you are never alone in this journey.
If you have other fears you think I should discuss, please don’t hesitate to comment here!
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