It was the admittance that we could have made it work that has sent me into this dizzy dance. In a matter of seconds, my heart both broke and took flight. We could have made it work, he said. We should have tried.

But we didn’t, because we were so young, and didn’t really understand the enormity of the situation placed before us.

What we’re left with is this depressing realization that we probably could have made it work. Not just because we had a kid together, but because, even at the young age of seventeen, we’d found what most people search their whole life for. There’s a moment of palpable tension when we both admit that we’ve never found what we had, even in the partners we both have. In each other, we’d found that intense love that many would walk the earth to find.

Image: Rainshift

We’ve broken each other’s hearts. We’ve picked up pieces. We’ve understood each other, even when there was the murkiness of this adoption, a path I chose for all of us. The regret I feel, it’s profound. Yet, beyond the hurt, the hurt we’ve managed to overcome, there is this lightness, and still some of darkness. We’re still here for each other, walking this darkened path of adoption together.

I’m mourning.

I’m mourning the loss of a man that I still having certain feelings for. I’m mourning the fact that my fantasies could have been reality, and then the pain that comes knowing that we just didn’t tow the line in order to make it work. That, ten years later, wisdom and experience under our belt, there is this reverberating connection that’s linking us both together.

Does he wish what I wish? Does he wish that we could undo it all and try again?

How can I possibly still care for  this man? So many years have passed, I’ve found another man that I do love. I’ve started another family. Yet, all I can think about is what I’ve missed by not being with him. With that comes this incessant urgency to make it happen, like it might fix everything that has been broken in the last decade.

Despite that, I know it won’t fix a single thing. What’s been done, cannot be undone.

I’m stuck in this vortex, one that sucks me into the past, and makes me feel as though it was just yesterday, that he was kissing my forehead. That it was just yesterday when he showed up with flowers to a drama performance. That it was just yesterday that he uttered the words, “I love you” and I knew he really meant them. That yesterday was today, and that we could be everything we weren’t able to be.

In all the years since The Kiddo was relinquished, I never thought there would be a time when I would be entertaining the same fantasies, now with a bit of age to them. The idea that we could be together. I was content to let him fade into the background, to see hear of him, to speak of him, but never to engage these overwhelming feelings.

Unattainable; does that make this more attractive to me? Blind am I, to the actuality of the circumstance?

I just know this; I still love The Kiddo’s father, deeply, and strangely.

And that alone is cause enough for me to mourn the loss of what could have been with us. A path that lays undiscovered because of hasty decisions that were made for us, because we didn’t speak loud enough to change the path.

“I just don’t know how she does it, honestly. I mean, it’s not supposed to be like that. I think. Or maybe it is.” I felt bad for judging her. I was judging her, and but it said more about me.

“Why does it bother you that she has visits and is close with her daughter’s family?”

I paused for a second, and looked around the room. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it bothered me so much, but at the same time, I really just knew.

“If adoption can be that open, why isn’t it like that for me?” The question was a question, but it felt more like a proclamation.

“Why isn’t it?” was the next prodding question.

“Because I was told that it couldn’t be like that. I was told it was too much to expect. Why is it a normal expectation for her, but unheard of for me?”

“This doesn’t sound like it’s about her at all. It sounds like you are touching a reality you’ve never faced before”.

I shook my head. I was okay with my adoption story. I was the proud birthmother. The one on the panels. The one that smiled for the questions, and teared up only when it was appropriate. I never let my guard down, not even for a second.

But she. She had had it different than me, and it struck a nerve.

That was the beginning of my healing; whether I knew it or not, and I didn’t know it. It was the beginning of what I can only assume will be a life long journey. When I began to dig through the garbage I’d been sold about my adoption, I began to find raw, untouched, pulsating sores. Wounds that had long needed my attention, wounds that I really just wanted to ignore.

And I did. I ignored them for years. I let them fester, and grow infected. At the time I found them, I was just dealing with other forms of trauma. I was trying to find the roots of my anger and self-loathing. To start tending to another infection at the time was asking for too much. So I continued stating the age old diatribe I’d been taught to repeat. At that moment, I didn’t need epiphanies, or breakthroughs. I just needed to survive.

The news of The Kiddo’s diagnosis broke the dam. That well sustained wall, the one I’d carefully built for placing all of my adoption stuff, cracked, and fell to pieces in a matter of days. With it, the boils I’d been hiding, made their appearance. It was finally time for me to handle what I’d been putting off for so long. I went to work, and I went to work, naively, with the idea that one day, I’d be just fine.

That’s the thing about trauma; You’re never again going to be “just fine”. You find a new form of normal. You learn to cope with the debilitating sadness. You learn to be angry when it’s necessary, and sometimes, even when it’s not. Mostly, you just realize that there will always been this one wound that will never fully close. Even when you desperately want it to.

There is no rule book, in my opinion, on healing. We can tell someone as much as we want that they should get over it- because we did, or because we want them to. We can want people in our life to move on, to move forward. We can encourage them, we can guide them, and at the end of the day, if they refuse to do so, our wanting is not the answer.

I’ve learned that I can do my best to continue to heal, but I can’t stop life from being a trigger. Most days, I can handle the loss I feel. Yet, there are days when I can’t help what I feel. Sometimes it’s something as simple as my parented son going to school for the first time. Other times, it’s a conversation with The Kiddo’s father. That doesn’t mean that I’m coming undone, or that I’m not properly healing. It means I’m giving the grief I feel, no matter how old, the warranted time it deserves. Grief, no matter how ugly, no matter how untrained, deserves it’s time to be felt, to be handled, and to be addressed.

There are times when I’m stagnant. Like right now; a closed adoption, no voice, no sight.

I’ve found a new wound, and the infection is so deep, that I have no idea where to start. So I stop and I wait. It looks unproductive, and sometimes, god, it feels so unproductive. It’s not though, even when I’m still, even when I’m defensive, and refusing to move, I’m still moving something around. In this case, I’m searching to find the root of the problem, and I’m trying to find out if this is a wound I can heal for good, or if it’s a wound that will remain forever.  Even when we’re not processing, we’re still processing. Even when we refuse the obvious answers, and get caught up in the non-essential, we’re still moving forward. Even when it doesn’t look like that on the outside.

This hurt I feel, the hurt that has buried itself, it’s not going to go away. Not entirely. Even when, or if, there is a reunion, there will be an insurmountable depth of grief that correlates with all of the things I didn’t have. I’m still learning that and if I’m still learning what I’ve lost, how can I fully heal this wound? I can make it so it’s less irritating, but I’ll never have the ability to fully close it. I can only do the best I can, and continue to learn to cope. To survive.

Because, isn’t that healing? Learning to survive. Learning to fight. Learning to mend what can be repaired, and accepting that which is ostensibly broken.

This isn’t the way that the story was supposed to play out.

They told me that I would hate you. That you would disappear from my life, and I would likely never see you again. They told me that you were just like every other man who had done this to a girl. The kind of man that just didn’t care, that didn’t want to deal with it, and of course, that you would never care. They told me that we were better off without you, that if I kept him, that it would be complicated and messy. As though life isn’t generally complicated and messy.

And yet, here we are.

The years have past, and there is still this flicker of a flame between us. This unrequited connection that shines with love and caring. We still love each other, but in a very exceptionally different way now. They didn’t tell me that I wouldn’t stop loving you. They filled my head with hatred for you, and I filled the void in my heart, the one that missing you created, with anxiousness and distrust.

I only hated you because you never came back. Wrapped up in my own selfishness, I never truly considered that you might be feeling the same level of fright that I was. We were kids, just two crazy, madly in love, stupid kids who found themselves in an incredibly huge, bigger than them situation. We never meant for that to be the way the story ended, and really, it wasn’t the end, like they said it was. It was just a chapter closing, bringing with it a new chapter for us to navigate.

When I see that seventeen year old girl in my mind, the one collapsing to the floor when she heard the news that she was pregnant, I can only think of you. I want to rush to her now and tell her to hold on. To just wait. I want to tell her to let time take it’s course, and not to rush. She knows things will be hard, but she didn’t know that she didn’t need to listen to all those outside voices. I’d tell her that no matter how hard she tries to fit into their story, the one of the Perfect Birthmother, and the vacant Birthfather, she’ll, we’ll never fit. You can’t put characters from one book into another and expect them to work out the same. It just doesn’t work like that.

She’ll regret the hatred she had for you, but she’ll want to know why you never came back for her. When you had been there for her through so many other things, why was it that this was the moment when you chose to abandon her, and pretend that she never existed? She’ll want those answers, and one day, you give them to her, just as she suspected you might. When she forgives you, she’ll finally start to forgive herself, because the true reason she hated you was because she hated who she had become.

You can’t blame her. The world that she was thrown into, the one where she was a teenager, pregnant and alone, was an isolated,  lonely one. Between the troubles of her past, and the notion that you would never love her, or him, she made choices for you, for her, and for him. It was easier to paint you as the bad guy, because admitting that she, that I, still loved you was too hard. Fighting for a relationship with you, fighting for a life with you was too hard, and I didn’t know that life was always going to be about the uphill climb. That there was rarely anything good in life that didn’t need to be fought for.

You were a battle I should have fought for. Not just for me, but for him. He deserved to know you. You deserved to be a part of his life, and I took that option away from you. Out of spite, out of anger, and out of assumptions about the dealings of the heart. Because, in my youth, I assumed that life wasn’t complicated, and that parenting with you, keeping our child, would just be unwarranted complication. Maybe it would have been, but I didn’t have the right to make a choice for three, a choice for one.

The hardest pill to swallow is the eager regret we both feel, and the cold-hearted reality that what’s done, is done. Because we were both foolhardy. Because we were both scared. Who knew that ten years later, we’d be staring into the nostalgic abyss, waxing poetic on how things were, sharing another piece of history. It was the passion and love we found together that brought us together, and now, it’s the basic commonality of being erased. We’re two shadows, melded together, in the life of a child we bore together, and we are both haunted by the regrets of yesterday. Maybe it’s the passage of time, but as adults, we recognize the stupidity of our youth, and understand that the storm that I was warned against, was likely one we could have weathered together.

We could have tried. We should have tried.

But they told me that I couldn’t do that to him. They told me that he wouldn’t want to be raised by us, separately, or together. And, I, oh, I was foolish enough to listen to that. Even when my heart was still pumping for you. Even when my dreams still reflected your image in them. Even when I knew they were wrong.

Ironically, this ordeal, it’s still complicated. It’s so messy. We have the years between us, the wisdom to match, and the pain of the mistakes we both made. Most importantly, we don’t have him, and that’s the most complicated aspect of all of this. Especially, when we both want him now. Especially when we know the error that was made.

It’s too late. All of it, it’s just too late.

At least we can give him this:

His mom and dad loved. They loved each other. They loved him, and the adoption, was never about him. We were just two kids, young and crazy. In love. With adults in our lives who didn’t believe in us.

I always believed in us. I never stopped. I just lost sight of you.

The snow has blanketed the area, leaving this calm, peaceful feeling in the air. Another year has gone by, another season has passed. And it seems that with each season, I’m not much closer to knowing The Kiddo than I was last year.

Last holiday season, there was hope. The promise of a possible reunion, a tiny light at the end of this grief stricken tunnel. And by the time, the first month of the new year had ended, all that hope, all that promise had been smashed into tiny fragments. The open adoption that was, was really never, and was officially closed. A chapter ended without my permission. And I just had to accept it.

As the year has passed, I’ve wondered what it was that I did. There was a proposal, an idea to extend the openness further, and a suggestion that we look at the way we were handling it, differently. My voice, a voice I thought had mattered all along was silenced swiftly, with an iron fist of entitlement and control. There was no room for discussion, because it seemed the feelings for the adoptive parents, as they had before, would win out in the end. I was just The Birthmother. The womb that held their child. The being from which their child came from. A human for which they proclaim to have the utmost respect for, but when it came down to the gritty of it all, they had none whatsoever.  Do they have the same lack of respect for The Kiddo? I shiver to think that they might not respect him the way he deserves. After all, rejecting his biological mother, and rejecting him contact shows how very little they respect his very beginnings.

What motivated their harsh reaction to me suggesting that I initiate contact? I have no answers, just theories. I suspect, though they denounce it, that the main player in this ordeal was simply their insecurity. What if they couldn’t measure up to biology? What if they couldn’t compete with me? What if he was better understood by the woman who had given birth to him and shared his biology? What if, all along, they had been wrong about his differences, the ones they went and clinically diagnosed, and he was simply, just different from them? What would happen if he had access to the origins from which he came?

In their minds, I assume, it would mean facing the reality of who he really is. I can say that I know who they want him to be, and their actions have shown that it’s not likely the same person that resides within him. His connection to his biology is not of any importance to them, because they seem to not understand what it means to not really know where you came from. Being open, truly open? It was not something they viewed as a necessity, as we’ve obviously seen. It was not something of any importance to them. For them to control the situation to the point where they utterly refused contact showed that their investment was not for The Kiddo, and his well-being, but simply for themselves. Is that a grand assumption on my part? Possibly, but their silence, their unwillingness to even negotiate better ideas shows that they were simply closing themselves down because the adoption was beginning to be out of their control.

Just as winter has frozen the land beneath the mountains of snow, my adoption has frozen for the moment. However, there is hope that one day, spring will come, and the snow will melt away. For the adoptive parents, they will learn too late that this control they worship so deeply will be lost, and that time will march forward, without them. Beneath that blanket of snow will be the remains of the damage that was caused by their unwillingness to be open or even open-hearted. And for that, I’m sure they will regret, as the time of our reunion blossoms before their eyes, the true hindrance they were in allowing a natural relationship to proceed.

Or maybe they won’t. Perhaps they hope for a time when I completely disappear.

I won’t. Ever. I’ll be here, waiting for the next season of this adoption. Because, we all know, eventually, winter does end.

Image Credit: Herry Lawford

The news that they were pregnant was still looming over me. I couldn’t turn a corner without thinking things like, “I thought they were the right family,” or “They can’t have two kids that close in age, it just isn’t possible.” My heart was shattered. However, when I thought of relinquishing The Kiddo to them, despite the fact that they would have their own biological child months later, I felt sick.

“Marci, what if they don’t love him the same way? Am I crazy for thinking that they couldn’t?” I had whispered into the phone earlier that day. I stared at the backyard, the sun glistening off the fresh snow, and I shivered.

There was silence on her end. Silence that I knew, since we’d been friends long enough, meant she was going to say something I didn’t necessarily like or want to hear, but it would be truthful.

“You aren’t crazy. I would wonder too. Are they capable of loving two babies, so close in age, one that came from themselves, and the other from a stranger?”

Tears stung my eyes.

“But…I was so sure they were the family. I mean, I have no other option.”

“You do have other options Danielle. You just don’t see them anymore.”  At the time, I knew that she was struggling with this so-called decision of mine to relinquish The Kiddo. She had her own issues, fertility ones that she learned about long before most of us were thinking about having kids. She was disappointed in the way this scenario was playing out; I just never told her that I was too. Brave face, fake smile.

She was the only one who was honest with me about the fact that The Kiddo would be going to a home just months before the adoptive family would experience birth “naturally”. She was the only one who validated my fear that they would struggle to love him because it was, and would be so entirely different. She was the only one who didn’t buy into the whole idea that this entire incident was foreordained by god.

“My roommate says that they, their baby, and Kiddo, must have planned this together. That they wanted to be a family,” I admitted.

I heard her snicker, “You are telling me that god purposely got you pregnant, made you decide to do adoption, picked a family who is supposedly infertile (they aren’t, Danielle), gives them a child of their own, and yours, while you get nothing?”

I stumbled to find the right words, “It’s not that simple, and you know it.”

“But it is. Is this the kind of garbage they are telling you? That god planned for your birth control to stop working? I don’t know, I’m religious, and my god isn’t a vindictive manipulator.”

I sighed and changed the subject. We’d never seen eye to eye religiously, but this new topic, the idea that certain events in our lives are foreordained was obviously a topic we’d have to avoid in the future. I added it to my mental list of other topics we couldn’t discuss because our opinions were far too different. However, a twinge of regret went through my body as I knew I was writing her off for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the subject matter. What did religion have to do with the fact that this couple, a supposed infertile couple, was now pregnant, and wanting to still adopt my child, have to do with anything?

* * * * * * * * * *

“It happens all the time, Danielle” my volunteer worker told me as she navigated the icy evening streets. I watched the lights pass by, and I shrugged my shoulders.

“I just have my doubts about their ability to properly handle it. The emotions will be much different. The experience will be much different. They’ll love their own child much differently, and so soon. What about bonding?”  More tears were on the verge of falling, something that seemed to be happening more often that not, lately.

“Talk to them tonight. See how you feel. If you don’t want to go through with it, we’ll find another couple.”

“That’s the thing, I already looked. No one else felt right. I didn’t like anyone else.”

” Then perhaps you need to consider that this was meant to be.”

Another person who was telling me that this situation was meant to be. I was beginning to resent the idea. First, it was foreordained that I would become pregnant. My Bishop told me that in a blessing. I became pregnant so another family who was unable to have their own child, could have my child. The child that was not meant to be in my life. Now, repeatedly in the short 24 hours since I had found out that they were expecting their own child, I had more than a handful of people tell me that this situation was planned by god. My faith in this so-called God was beginning to waver, and Marci’s description of him being a vindictive manipulator was beginning to seem more and more accurate.

“It’s luck.” I blurted out.

“What?” she replied, as she turned a corner to lead us to the agency building. In less than an hour we would be speaking to the “perfect” couple in the profile, over the phone. I didn’t see the point, really. I had already decided that I didn’t want them to have my child. I hadn’t honestly told a single soul that I was going to tell them this over the phone tonight.

“It’s just luck. They were probably told that they would spend years in the adoption pool, and wouldn’t be picked so quickly. They were only in it for a handful of months. If I had waited until January, like you and Brad had wanted, they wouldn’t be in the pool of candidates any longer. It’s not an act of God.”

She smiled at me and said, “Or, those two babies, are up in heaven right now, watching this all unfold. They were such good friends that they had to go to the same family, and this was the only way they could make it happen.

I wanted to throw up.

* * * * * * * * * *

Their voices rang through on the phone, and I sat back in the uncomfortable church chair that I was accustomed to sitting in at least twice a month. They were happy to talk, and I was happy to listen.

The dialogue kept on going back and forth between the four adults; the couple, my volunteer worker, and the psychologist who was acting as the mediator for this phone call.

I blurted out, “Have you thought of names?”

Before I could explain myself, they were answering that they weren’t sure about the adoption was going through and didn’t want to talk about it. I had wanted to know if they had thought of names for their own baby, the one they were pregnant with.

The adoptive father became emotional, and began to describe a similar scene to the one that my worker had painted outside in the car; two kids, who wanted these two people as their parents. As his tears became audibly apparent, I found myself crying with him. Then I heard myself tell them that we’d go ahead with the adoption, despite the circumstances. It’d be no different than having twins I told them.

* * * * * * * * * *

The week before, I had sat where they were now sitting, and I had sobbed as the agency director told me that The Kiddo had been diagnosed with an alcoholic related defect. As I remembered her condescending words, “You stopped drinking when you knew you were pregnant, I’m sure”, as I struggled to compose myself, to at least be able to fumble the words that the diagnosis was far-reaching, and inaccurate. I couldn’t do it because every time I opened my mouth to speak, I was met with more condescension about how I couldn’t have known.

They were wrong. They were so wrong. This whole situation was so wrong. Every bit of my body seemed to be growling in protest, but I couldn’t fight back. I felt too guilty about the what if- what if he was suffering from some defect as a result of my drinking when there was no way I would have known that I was even pregnant?

It happened again. They must have known that I was questioning them, because right after I asked them to tell me exactly how they went about getting the diagnosis, and how hard it had been for them, the adoptive father launched into the same speech he’d given over the phone, almost a decade ago.

This time though, they knew I wasn’t religious. This time they knew that I didn’t believe in such things, and yet, the speech about the foreordination of their biological child and my son, was playing out again. This time, I wasn’t swayed by the tears. This time, my stomach was far too tangled in knots to believe the nonsense. Somehow, it felt as though they were warning me that a denial in the rightfulness of this placement would be a sheer denial of god. They must have forgotten that I was atheist.

When the meeting was over, The Hubby, turning the key in the ignition, frowned and looked at me,

“They really believe that god sent them Kiddo, eh?”

I laughed, “I guess. I think it’s just their way of saying that he belongs to them, and not to me. A warning to not deny the rightfulness of him in their family, even though it seems as though they are struggling to find him a place within it.”

“It’s strange, Danielle. They believe that you got pregnant so they could have a kid that they barely talk about with the same light and love that they speak of their own biological children. Why talk about it? What does religion have to do with this? They went out and diagnosed him, not God. We were meeting to discuss that. Not the fact that god knocked you up so they could collect children for their family.”

I hadn’t heard someone speak this abrasively or honestly about the foreordination piece of my adoption since I’d had that phone call with Marci, so many years before.

“Collect children?” I stammered.

“God wanted them to have your son because he decided you weren’t good enough for him? Isn’t that messed up? Isn’t it messed up to repeat that to your face?”

I nodded silently.

“Sorry, it just made me want to laugh in their faces. They seem smarter than that. Or maybe that’s the point; manipulate you into feeling guilty for questioning whether The Kiddo should have gone to them in the first place.”

“I think that’s what’s coming next. If I don’t buy into the idea that this whole scenario was “planned”, then something went very wrong, at some point, and there are a lot of people who need to answer for the lack of ethics involved,” I ran my hand through my hair, and shook my head. The night before I had spent two hours with my mouse hovering over what most would call an anti-adoption website, only to find myself crying, and nodding along with the rhetoric found within each of the posts.

“You know what I think?”  I shook my head, knowing I didn’t really need to answer my husband.

“I think that they didn’t bond with Kiddo properly. I think that he was a tough baby for obvious reasons; I think that three months later, their own easy baby came along, and suddenly, they were instantly bonded with a baby that looked like them and acted like they expected. I think that this has caused problems that they aren’t talking about with you because they don’t want you to know that they wanted to redact the adoption. And I think, that she, his adoptive mother? I think she still hasn’t bonded with him properly. Which is why they won’t let you meet him.  She’s afraid of something.”

My mouth gaped open.

“I think she’s afraid of me.” I muttered.

“I’m sure that works into their little heaven plan, somehow,” he rolled his eyes as he continued to drive down the highway.

“Oh, I’m sure it does. It’s all part of some plan, or some higher lesson.” I agreed sarcastically, tears running down my cheeks.

Even ten years later, I was not respected as the woman who helped start their family, but as some pawn in their religious tirades about how they were meant to have the fruit of my womb, because god saw favor with them.