Tag Archives: birthmothers

Adoption Words

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A word about words

Adoption words. Let’s have a word here about the adoption words so prevalent in any discussion of adoption.

Birthmother, an adoption word

I’ve been looking at other adoption/birthmother blogs and general adoption sites on the internet. What I’ve found is that there is no consensus among birthmothers about what we want to be called. Some of us think the word “birthmother” is derogatory and implies being used as a breeder. The word birthmother is sometimes a hyphenate, sometimes a compound word. I like the word birthmother in its run-on one word fashion. There’s something headlong about it that describes my personal experience.  Which was I can’t believe this is happening, but it is happening and there’s no way I can stop it.

Birthmother seems appropriate for other reasons, too. I gave birth to my son. I’m his mother. The mother who gave birth to him. Even if he has an adoptive mother. The other terms out there include bio-mother or biological mother, first mother, exiled mother. I desire no squabble with any woman who has had a child and relinquished it for adoption. Let her call herself by the name she prefers. And let us not divide ourselves from one another.

Relinquish, another adoption word

The word “relinquish” also interests me. It was the word used by my social worker in 1970 as I prepared to give up my son. It’s in common parlance today as well. I use it, but maybe I would like to break myself of the habit.
 
Relinquish according to Webster means to withdraw from, to retreat from, leave behind or give up–and here’s the part that pisses me off.  It “usually does not imply strong feeling but may suggest some regret, reluctance, or weakness.”  I wonder if adoption professionals got together and handpicked this word. I find it far more insulting than birthmother or any of its alternatives. I don’t, however, have a better word. Which is the problem about these adoption words. Looking for a better word when there might not be one. What if the focus had been looking for a better resolution to the mess we birthmothers found ourselves in. That solution should have been not considering it to be a mess at all. That solution should have been being able to keep our children if we wanted to. That however would have required a different world, not just a different word.

The Best Advice About Grief

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This is the best advice I’ve ever read about grief.

It comes from Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies:

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.
 
 
Like many birthmothers, I gave birth to my baby in secret. Secret losses can only be grieved privately, without support, and that’s more like denial than grieving. More like the desert than the necessary sea. 

 

 

Today is the best!

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Today is the best day of the rest of your life!

A poster similar to this one here hung on the wall of my social worker’s office at the adoption agency.

Its message struck my 17-year-old self as profound.  I understood it to mean that I should live in the present, forget about the past and the baby I couldn’t keep. Go forward. Never look backwards. These ideas were routinely espoused by adoption professionals in the 1970s. Birthmothers were assured we’d forget the babies we gave away. That the other children we’d have later would fill the emptiness.

For me, it was the opposite that occurred. There were no best days. It was after the birth of my first daughter that I realized the fullness of  what I had done. What I had lost. What my son had lost. Those feelings consumed me. Every day I climbed out of a dark hole, only to fall back to the bottom again and again. When my third child was born, I knew I had to search for my son. To at least try to find him. To leave a message in a bottle, so to speak, in the hope that he would someday know that I had always loved him.

All these years later whenever I hear or see, “Today is the best day of the rest of your life,” it’s a shot to the heart.