Great Birthmother Resource

Our submission today is by Monika, who blogs at Monika's Musings. Monika became a birthmom at 34 years old.  She currently lives near Tacoma, WA, with Nick, her partner and daughter’s birthdad.  They enjoy an open adoption with their daughter and her parents, who live near Portland, OR. Monika will be blogging on occasion at Give1 to help give a valuable birth parent perspective for our domestic page. Today she shares information about an great resource for birthmother's.  

I relinquished my daughter to an open adoption in January 2010. When I relinquished my daughter, I knew no one that was a birth mom, especially since my opinion was that I was unique in choosing to have an open adoption with my daughter and her adoptive parents. In July of that year, my case worker at the adoption agency I used told me about BirthMom Buds (www.birthmombuds.com). She said that it was a community where I could connect with other people that had placed their children with adoptive families. I joined, thinking I might talk with a couple of other birth moms occasionally and that would be it.

I quickly fell into frequently posting on the private forums and chatting with other birth moms in the hosted chats on Monday nights. I also started talking to Coley, one of the founders of BirthMom Buds. Though she and I live on opposite coasts, we started sending long emails back and forth both through Facebook and then through our personal email accounts.

Around January 2011, I started hearing about the annual retreat that BirthMom Buds hosts in Charlotte, North Carolina, the weekend before Mother’s Day weekend. I knew without a doubt that I wanted to go, not only to meet Coley in person, but to connect in person with some of the other birth moms that I’d been talking to online for so long. It was an amazing experience. Though no one that attended had exactly the same adoption experience as anyone else, we all connected through our shared loss. Just as people who have struggled with infertility or miscarriage reach out to others who have experienced similar things, the loss of adoption brings you together in a unique way.

I’ve now been to two BirthMom Buds retreats and am planning to attend my third one this May. Over the long weekend, we laugh. We cry. We forge friendships that last long past the weekend retreat and love each other through the hurt. We learn about the unique experiences of one another, and we learn how we share similar experiences and feelings as well. No matter how at peace we are with our own personal adoption story, we still feel loss. It’s fantastic to be able to really let go and experience our loss with the support of other people who know exactly how we feel. It’s great to talk about our adoption stories without using qualifiers or titles because we all know how each person in our unique stories relates to each other. We don’t get raised eyebrows when talking about our child’s mother or father. For those birth moms who haven’t told many people about the child they’ve placed and the feelings surrounding that placement, it’s a time to really open up and release some of the demons that chase them all year round.

I can’t imagine not attending the retreat. It’s expensive for me to pay for the flight and hotel costs (the retreat itself is free for birth moms), but I wouldn’t want to use the money I spend for anything else. It can be an emotionally exhausting weekend full of ups and downs. But being with people who know how I feel because they’ve been there too is an absolutely priceless experience.

As an aside, I’m coordinating a fundraiser to help fund the hotel costs for two birth moms who would not have been able to attend but for a generous donor who took care of their flight arrangements. If you’re interested in donating to the fundraiser, here’s the link - http://fndr.se/sgWW . Like I said in the blurb about my fundraiser, if I surpass my fundraising goal I will donate the rest to BirthMom Buds to either assist with retreat costs or to help another birth mom pay for transportation and/or lodging. Please pass the link along – you never know who might donate!

National Adoption Month

As we begin November, we leave all the pink ribbons behind in October.  Everyone knows what they represent and honor.  You can buy you're cereal with a pink ribbon on it, and even the NFL players are willing to wear pink one day a month.   Now that the month is behind us, the pink doesn't seem to be plastered everywhere.  However, do you know that November is known for something too, it's National Adoption Month.

There was quite the conversation that many of my friends on Twitter had.  Many of them had been touched by adoption, either as an adoptive mother or a birth mother.  It was during that conversation that my opinion about this being a 'special adoption month' changed.  Many times, this month is seen as a celebration, however this celebration often leaves out one critical part of the adoption triad.  Though the adoptive parents are beyond thrilled to celebrate the addition's to their family, it ignores the third side of the adoption triad, the birth families.  Though they may celebrate the life their child has, their pain and grief are mostly ignored for this month.

Our family has chosen not to celebrate this month anymore than we celebrate each day Isaac is in our life.  Instead, our goal is to bring awareness to all the many different aspects and types of adoption.   Though our family chose to adopt domestically through an agency, there is also foster to adopt, and kinship adoption, and private adoptions that happen.  These are each important and special types of adoption, often clouded by assumptions and misinformation by the general public.

As we go through this month, I think of Isaac's birthmother.  She's on my mind often, but the frequency increases when he hit's milestones and around holidays.  I think of how no one in her family knows what a brave woman she is, putting her son's life above her own feelings.  The only person that knows about the adoption is Isaac's birthfather, who lives several states away from her.  I often pray that the hurt and grief will become lessened  and that she will be able to find joy, no matter how small, in Isaac's life.  Though we don't have contact with his birth family at this time, I am lucky to know several birth moms.  They have each opened my eyes to the daily struggle and joy that they feel.  I am grateful for my friendship with them, because  they have made me much more aware and sensitive to the third, and often forgotten, side of the adoption triad.  

May you think of them too, and honor them with me.

The Box in the Closet

Searching for my winter sweaters the other day, I came across a box I threw in the back of the closet of old prescriptions, boxes of syringes, and small clear glass vials. The box contains a red medical-grade syringe "sharps" container, full to the brim. It contains a variety of little glass vials both empty and still full.

Keeping a box of old syringes in a closet probably isn't the safest thing in the world, especially when you live in a home with three toddlers. I can't imagine throwing it out. I'm even pretty sure if we moved into a new home tomorrow, next year, or years down the road....the box would follow us to our new home and into the back of a new closet again.

I remember a long time ago when the box was new. I remember walking out of a pharmacy with all of those same syringes and vials and pills new in their packages carried in two large grocery bags. A receipt a mile long trailed behind me. The brown paper bags contained all my hope, right there wrapped up in a convenient package. I didn't know at the time that all my hope at the time might have been in those bags - but my future was not with it.

The box reminded me of how elusive parenthood was for a very long time and how, at the time, I would have never predicted the three littles under our roof today.

Someday I'll share with my kids the story of our family in it's entirety. That story includes how difficult it was for us to conceive. The importance of sharing this truth with our children someday may help them understand our re-directed passion in fighting for them, our willingness to let go of one dream and begin with another, and why adoption became the heart of our family. I hope my daughters can also understand a woman's worth should never be placed on if she can carry her own children.

Parenthood is a blessing, not one that everyone gets to experience, and never to be taken for granted.

The box reminds me of that. So for now, in the closet it stays.