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This was a lovely article: honest, bittersweet, real.
Although the guilt that "open adoption" mothers is undeniably real and admirable, I hope they can take solace in a little perspective.
Try to remember the devastating journey of birth mothers in the past. In the past year, I was reunited with my biological grandmother. I took with a fair amount of equanimity the revelation that my father was the product of a rape, but Louise has never recovered from that. What shook my world was the way this highly responsible young woman was treated by family and society in 1940. For most women of that era and prior ones, violence, or the threat of it, was constantly beneath the surface of daily life. Losing a child to adoption was . . . well, I cannot even begin to describe the emotional turmoil my grandmother went through, because she struggles for words describing it to me. I heard the anguish even in the voice of her husband, who was with her at the time but clearly not the father. I learned that most of the guilt was on their side, not my adoptive grandmother's.
And what of abortion? Look around you at women over 70, and try to see young women faced with a choice that was, truly, no choice at all. There are more of them than you think, and don't kid yourself, some of them are in your own family. The power of birth mothers to control the circumstances of adoption is directly related to their power of choice in the first place.
And then, when you have considered these things, if you are an adoptive mother, put your guilt in perspective. Not all happy choices are without a painful underside, just as parenthood itself is a bittersweet journey -- even feeling guilt is a privilege. Things could have turned out much, much worse for the birth mother.
Meeting my grandmother happened around the same time I found out I would not ever give birth. Someday, I may be an adoptive mother. And I choose to feel good about that.
