Birth mothers (adoption related)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not sure if this is the right forum; it’s a combination of my personal musings plus an actual quest for opinions, so I’ll start here and The Powers That Be can move as appropriate.

Tomorrow is my birthday ( cross my heart, this is *not *a cry for attention!). As an adoptee I’m given to wonder if my birth mother is thinking / wondering about me, if she remembers the date, if it’s a painful reminder, etc. . . .

I have known I’m adopted since I was a young girl, five or six- and I honestly have never had an emotional problem with it. I have had, over the years - off and on- a curiosity, to the point where I’ve signed up with adoption registries. They have pretty much proved to be expensive and non-effective. So, I’m asking for opininons from any ladies (or men) who have given up a child for adoption. Do you remember / think of them on their birthdays? How would you feel if they contacted you?

2

She (found her 16 years ago) often thought of me on my birthday-so much so that she once mistakenly had a birthday party for one of my sisters, born Jan 14, on the 19th (my birth day-in July). Been very rewarding, and now I have 2 sisters and 3 incredible nieces that I wouldn’t have known about if I hadn’t done the search.

3

I am a birth mother. I gave up my baby daughter when I was 16. I think about her every day, and it’s particularly hard on her birthday. I can’t speak for all birth moms but I bet there’s a good chance she thinks about you a lot and would like to hear from you.

4

I never, ever thought of that. I know my birth mother, but I don’t know if she loves me or not. I mean, one person in all my life has told me she did love me when I was a baby, but it’s not like she’s ever made any efforts to be close to me.

And my birthday is coming up next month. It never occured to me to think of what she might be doing on that day.

She’s got two other kids. I suppose I just assumed she’s fulfilled by my half-brothers. Who wants a girl, anyway. :rolleyes:

5

I’m adopted. Way back in the days of usenet I was active in alt.adoption which was a forum for everyone involved in the process (birth parents, adoptive parents, and the adopted). The stories were all over the place. Some mothers gave up their children and thought about them constantly afterwards. Others never gave them a second thought. Some reunions were happy, some weren’t.

In my own case, my birth mother had died before I managed to track her down. I found out that she thought about me often, and since she worked for the state she kept track of both me and my older sister that she also gave up for adoption (which was illegal on her part as it involved sneaking into the records room and looking up records she had no business seeing - she would have been fired if caught). She lost track of me when I moved out of the state but her sisters told me that she thought of me often. She did eventually get married but she never had any other children.

If you are really interested in finding your birth mother, my wife may be able to help you. She’s into genealogy and she did the lion’s share of the work in tracking down my birth mother. Send me a PM if you are interested.

6

I surrendered my daughter at 16. She found me when she was 28. In her first letter, she asked me if I ever thought of her. In my first letter, I told her I thought of her once for every star in the night sky. And it was no lie.

Ours has been a charmed reunion. Her parents are spectacular people, not the least threatened by her desire to seek me. She told me she’d often been reminded, growing up, of the importance I had played in the formation of their family. She is wicked beautiful and spectacularly accomplished, open hearted and filled with lovingkindness. I know reunions are not this way for everyone. And there is no way, beyond going slow, of knowing what you might get, when you roll those dice.

I know I would never have looked for her. Ever. Why? I honestly felt I didn’t have the right. I had sort of made my deal with the Devil. I’d surrender everything and she would be delivered everything I dreamed for her. I couldn’t break that covenant, I’d entered into when I was little more than a child myself.

When she contacted me, my world began to spin, in a way that’s hard to describe. It was something. It must have been similar for her. A wild ride. But we were alike, in fact. And that carried us through the hardest parts, I think. Both of us startled and amused to share the world, suddenly with someone who felt and sometimes thought, just like ‘me’. Hard to describe.

Thank all the Gods that be, for her need to know. My life is transformed by having her, (+family), in it. I had let an old but very deep wound scar over. It was not without pain to reopen it. But from that, came the healing of, that which can never truly be healed. Yes, it was very challenging emotionally, for us both. But definitely worth it.

If you have other questions, just ask, you’re not alone!

7

I’m an adoptee. Think of my parents regularly. I’m sure March 3 is hard for them, even 34 years later.

8

I was also adopted, and while I certainly appreciate my birth mother giving me up to be raised by absolutely the best Mom & Dad any human being has ever been blessed with, I have absolutely NO desire to ever meet her, learn about her or have any other contact with her.

Hope wherever she is at she is happy and healthy, (and honestly it wouldn’t hurt my feelings whatsoever if she has completely forgotten all about me) for she has no need for any guilt or regret on my behalf…

I realize everyone who has been adopted (or who has placed a child for adoption) will have their own unique feelings on the situation.

9

I once was in the back seat (so to speak) watching the drama of a re-union between a birth-mother and her son.

At first, it went well. Happiness, love, sharing, joy.

After about a week…they couldn’t stand each other. The son packed his stuff and left. It was sad, and solemn, and a bit terrible. Let’s just say that mental illness played a significant role.

I hope that most re-unions are happy and healthy, but, alas, at least some are not.

10

I’ll try to keep a very long story short. My late father was in his teens when his mother told him she’d adopted him (in 1926); She gave him as much info as she could about his birth mother. She died not too many years later.
Several years after that, now in his 20’s, Dad became more and more curious about his biologic mother, and started looking for her. No luck. Every ten years or so he’d get the bug and search again, always without success.
Finally, at age 65, Dad tried “one last time” - - and found her. Turned out her birth certificate had never been recorded, but her death certificate had been. Dad had missed her by 7 years. After a huge amount of indecision and nervousness, Dad contacted the only surviving member of the family- his mother’s older brother, who was by then in his late 80’s. That amazing man (who I had the profound pleasure of meeting) welcomed my Dad with open arms, and when they met he told Dad all about his biologic mother.
Uncle N. clearly remembered when his younger sister had gotten pregnant, barely 16, “out of wedlock.” The father was also 16. She desperately wanted to keep the baby, but her father forced her to give the child for adoption. Uncle said that she was seriously depressed for “years” afterward, and was never pregnant again, despite being married and divorced four times.
That’s the story.

11

Thanks for the great responses, all. Don’t know why I’m thinking about it this year but it’s nice to hear from others and get different perspectives.

12

My coworker has a sad family adoption story. Apparently her mom got pregnant very young, was too terrified to tell her parents, ran off with another boyfriend (not the baby’s father) and ended up delivering the baby by themselves, in an RV. She gave that baby boy up for adoption, married the boyfriend and had 3 more children (my coworker being the middle child).

Flash forward 40 years and the adopted baby tracked down the mother and attempted contact. She refused contact, she didn’t want a relationship because she couldn’t bear to tell her mother she had a baby out of wedlock. The oldest child did contact his half siblings (including my coworker) and they have met and all generally like each other.

I think it’s absolutely tragic that the mother (who must be nearly 60!) can’t confess after all this time what happened. Plus, she’s denying her mother the chance to know her own grandchild.

13

I gave up my daughter and she’s since found me. I have a card or a letter for her for every one of her birthdays that I’ve saved for 28 years. I plan to give them to her when we meet in the Spring.

I was also adopted - I’m sure March 3 is a tough day for my mom and dad, wherever they are.

14

I know someone that gave two kids up for adoption when they were 3 and 5. her husband had always beat her during their marriage, and when she left him, he kidnapped and terrorized her for days, and then when to prison. Shortly after that, she felt like she couldn’t care for the two boys they had, and she adopted them out. They reunited a few years ago- one of them is a fundie Christian, and the other a psychopath who not only stole her car stereo, but came on to her!:eek: I don’t think any of them speak anymore.

15

I got a young woman pregnant a long time ago and we gave the resulting baby up for adoption. That was hard on both of us, and I second-guessed myself for a long time. I thought about her all the time, ESPECIALLY on her birthday. It was a bittersweet pasttime of mine to imagine what she was like and what kind of a person she was growing into. A couple of years ago we connected because we had both sent our info to an adoption registry. She is sweet, sensible, warm and is just a really cool young lady. Now we’re facebook friends, talk and text from time to time and see each other when she passes through town. I feel more whole now, and I wish I either lived closer to her, or that I had enough money to visit her sometimes.

16

That’s a really good way of expressing it. I always felt that she didn’t have any choice about being placed for adoption, so she alone owned the choice about whether to search for me. The system at that time didn’t even admit the possibility of reunion, but I still required the agency’s files to include my written permission for them to contact me if she ever wanted to find me. My plan was to register on adoption sites and place some classified ads once she reached legal age and then leave it up to her.

My story is incredibly similar :dubious::smiley: to the one elbows describes in her post, except my daughter was still a minor when she tracked me down (with the full support of her adoptive parents). Adoption protocols had loosened enough by then for them to invoke the permission I’d given them all those years before.

Unlike a lot of you, I did not think of my daughter frequently in the intervening years. I did take note of her birth date passing and make mental note of her age. This wasn’t out of a lack of caring or interest in my child but to save myself. I had to slam that door, throw the deadbolt, put on the chain, nail boards across it, fill in the crevices with caulking, and then wrap everything in layers and layers of duct tape in order to maintain a semblance of sanity. My daughter and I have been reunited now for about 20 years and I’m still working on deconstructing that barrier. Every once in a while a topic will come up that will cause a terrifying tsunami of grief to wash over me, and then I have to work through that and move on.

We haven’t had an absolutely perfect reunion, but I don’t think there is such a thing when we’re talking about something as unnatural as surrendering your own child to unknown persons. There are a lot of profound emotional issues on all sides. “Meeting” her, or encountering her for the first time as a non-infant, was the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. I was over the moon. I still think she’s the most amazing, talented, brilliant, hilarious person in the world. So yeah, in my case being contacted by her was a wonderful thing, but I led a pretty unfettered life. I’d always been open about her existence, never had to lie to a husband or parent about her, never bore any other children who needed to be considered. Some birthparents don’t have that kind of freedom. If you do decide to search, you’ll need knowledgeable support to help you deal with whatever response (or lack of response) you get.

Oh, and happy birthday!

17

My guess is that she doesn’t want to cause problems between you and your adoptive parents, so is keeping some emotional distance. (No direct personal experience with adoptions, so I may well not have a clue what I’m talking about.)

18

I’m adopted. My parents would occasionally offer to help me find my birth parents, or at least find out more information about them. I was never interested, and for quite a while had a niggling fear that some stranger would show up to ‘claim’ me. My older sister is also adopted, and she wanted to know everything about both of us (different adoptions, we’re not blood-related at all) and I had a hard time convincing her that I really don’t want to know. My parents are the people who took me home at 4 days old. They are gone now and I miss them, but I don’t want any replacements.

I’m 50 now, so the chances of that are diminishing I guess.

19

Yes birth mothers think of their child on their Birthdays, Chrismas, and other days. 98% of birth moms want to meet their children but the laws are so messed up that it is hard to find them. My sister in law had a daughter and she was taken by the court not because she was a bad 16 year old mother but just because she was a minor and had no say. Her daughter was born 1/25/1961 in Guthrie oklahoma and the mother has been searching for her for 51 years. You didn’t say how old you are or where you were born. Maybe someone is searching for you.

20

Do you two share a birthday, or is there something else about March 3?