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I have kept up with these posts and as a bmom I must be the out of the norm here. I had a closed adoption, open wasn't even an option at the time. Should it have been I think I still would have chose closed adoption. It is already difficult as it is to give up your precious child. You can only hope and pray that the family you select is as every bit as loving and caring and nuturing as you hoped they would be. I'm not sure I could have handled an open adoption, seeing my child grow up as someone else's and not being able to be the *mother*. You are then the outsider looking in. You want to give advice but know you really have *no right* to say how your child is being raised. Though questions throughout his childhood on how he was doing was easily erased by a phone call to the agency, it didn't happen. I felt that when I gave up my child, that meant for someone else to completely love and nuture the way I would have should I have been fit enough to be the mother, I wasn't at the time. How difficult that would have been for me should there have come a time in his life when I felt, all was NOW in order and I can *take it from here*. Being in the open adoption would have made me feel like it was my right to do just that, and it really wasn't.
I would have liked to have held him longer at birth to remember more than his given name, I would like to remember his smell and touch, something that would last me for a while, but it didn't happen, and I think that they did it for the *best* of the situation. I look back now 23 years later and am thankful how life has taken it's path on both of us. He does not hate me for giving him up, he's grateful I didn't have an abortion and gave him life to a loving family, that I prayed of all his life. It made him the well-adjusted person he is today. I'm not sure if I would have done it differently. He's the wonderful person he is because he had a great upbringinig, something I could not have done at the time, and probably moreso unprepared to do should I have been part of his life growing up.
I sitll love him deeeply and unconditionally, that doesn't change a bit. I love him for the person he's become, and knowing I was the one who gave him life's start, it was his afamily that gave life a meaning. He's so much more precious to me as we continue to learn about one another and knowing that he loves me for me, as we stand today, I can never and will not ever want to replace his amom-she's the real mother in all of this. She's done an incredible job, and to her, I thank her from the bottom of my heart.
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