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Originally Posted by Jackiejdajda
RavenSong
I never saw my son when he was born never held him never heard his first cry..
A friend told me I needed to do a visualization of holding him as a baby.. I can remember sitting on my front porch and doing the same kind of meditation that you speak about here.. It really helped.
Years later I stood on that front porch and looked into his eyes.. He became real..
Jackie
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Jackie,
Like you, I didn't see my son when he was born...never heard that first cry...and never held him. I was supposed to have natural childbirth, with only a pudendal block for the episotomy. I was also told that I could watch him being born via a mirror above the delivery table. Well, they let me do the hard part of labor naturally. But when they wheeled me into the delivery room (36 years ago today, btw), the nurses turned the mirror around so I couldn't see anything. They then proceeded to strap both my legs and my hands down, and an anesthesiologist appeared out of nowhere with a gas mask. My doctor didn't say a word, just sat down on a stool and started making the episiotomy incision without waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. I tried to fight off the gas mask, but it's kind of hard to do when your hands are strapped down to the table.
My doctor later told me that he thought I had bonded too closely with my baby while he was in the womb. And he thought that if I heard my son crying or if I saw him, I wouldn't be able to go thru with the relinquishment. He was of the old school....he did it in my "best interest", but he was dead wrong.
I think that the visual meditation of holding my son as an infant helped me to reconnect with him emotionally on some level. It was difficult for me at one point early in our reunion to reconcile my young adult son with my baby son. Betty Jean Lifton talks a lot about this phenomenon as part of her "Ghost Kingdom" theory. She tells this story in one of her books of how this one birthmom she knew opened her door to greet her newly found adult daughter. The bmom's first reaction when she saw her daughter standing there was to think, "what did you do with my baby?" Lifton believes that all members of the triad carry their own ghosts with them. For birthmothers, one of the ghosts is that of her newborn infant. Sometimes it's just hard to reconcile the "ghost" of that infant with the real-life adult son or daughter. This is where that meditation/visualization really helps me, I believe.
BTW, today is my son's 36th birthday. So today I've been remembering that early morning so long ago. Bittersweet, sad.... But I'm going to be calling him in a couple hours, so now I'm feeling kind of nervous. Wish me luck...