Some families see adoption as a way to save a child from poverty or worse. Some see it as a way to offer a better future, a safe home or even as an eco-friendly family expansion option (yes really). And for most, adoption fulfills a primal need to care for a child, a way to expand yourself and your world in ways you never thought possible. But adoption comes with a dark side, and the Internet is awash with personal blogs filled with pain and loss, and sometimes deep anger at a system that adoptees and birthmothers see as having betrayed them.
When we found out, two-and-a-half years ago, that a birthfamily wanted to meet and then place their baby with us, I was nervous but thrilled. It felt like a miracle. I was focused on our incredible good fortune, and it wasn’t until we went to the hospital to meet our son-to-be that I was faced with the devastating reality of loss for the birthmother. For me to be a mother, she had to lose a child. I have spent several years feeling sick about this reality. Having people say things like: “I could never give my baby away,” only reinforced my feelings of guilt.
An abundance of birthmother blogs underscore how difficult it is to place a child for adoption. Some birthmothers were coerced into placing their children while others are angry because their so-called open adoptions were closed by the adoptive parents, and others wonder if they made the right decision. Even in the case of solid, healthy open adoptions, the reality of releasing a human life to veritable strangers is as deep as it gets.
As for adoptees, there are accounts of adoptees who never jived with their adoptive families and kids who weren’t told they were adopted and found out later. Many are angry because they have no access to their original birth certificates or who feel that adoption is corrupt and they should have been raised by their biological families.
Since we adopted, I’ve always held this nagging feeling that somehow we did something wrong by adopting, that we are somehow responsible for causing pain to the birthfamily and future pain to our son. I worry that this pain will never be resolved and I’ll carry this guilt, which is a form of pain, around for life.
Logically, I have no reason to feel guilty (my husband does not feel this way). If we had not adopted our son, someone else would have so why not us. I believe strongly that we are a great match. We have an open adoption, and his birthparents never need to worry or wonder if he is all right. As for Theo, he will always know he was adopted; he has his original birth certificate, and knows where he came from. He will understand why he was placed for adoption and know that his birthfamily cares about him and that we do to. Theo, at 27 months, is a happy, healthy, highly enthusiastic little boy who is loved and adored by a lot of people. The reality is, if anything, Theo will suffer from too much care and love, and that’s really not something worth feeling guilty about, now is it?
If you are an adoptive parent, have you ever felt guilty?
I think every parent has guilt. I know I did with my oldest daughter, and I surely do with my adopted daughter. In Mea’s case it’s a little different since she was foster-adopted, but it’s still guilt. So many things to be guilty of as a mother. Am I doing enough? Am I trying hard enough? Is she happy? Etc, and so on, I think the list could go on forever.
I think it’s all a part of being a mom. no matter how you got there.
Wonderful post. As someone wise recently said, adoption is borne out of loss. It’s either caused by or causes that loss. The birthfamily loses (out of their own decision) the rights to parent the adoptee. The adoptee loses the chance to be parented by his or her birthfamily. Very often, the adoptive family has lost the chance to be biological parents for medical or other reasons. We all experience loss, and that is what binds us all together in the adoption triad. So you’re not alone in your feelings of grief and guilt. However, I strongly believe as a birthmother that I made the best decision I could for my daughter at the time of her placement – which was to have her raised by another family. I didn’t place her to be a hero, or to “make a family,” or for any other reason than I felt like it was (and continues to be) the best thing for HER. Your son’s birthfamily I’m certain made that very same decision. No matter how much grief we as birthparents may feel because we are not raising our biological children, it is NOT the adoptive parents’ fault, nor is it a corrupt industry. Yes, there may be instances of corruption. People will make mistakes and even adoptive parents can be “guilty” of wanting to fill the need for a child to raise so much that they resort to some unethical practices. So in other words, you were not the cause of your son’s birthparent’s grief, nor do you continue to be. Yes, an open adoption benefits all involved to some extent, but ultimately it is for the adoptee, and I think that your decision to continue an open adoption with Theo’s birthparents will prevent a lot of the feelings of grief that Theo might feel later had he not the opportunity that he’s getting.
what a beautiful, thought-provoking post.
Oh dear God. Could have written this myself, just not as eloquently. I only have six weeks of experience in an open adoption, but massive guilt. And yet, I know the reasons for Big Mama placing are substantial and will not change in the immediate future and maybe never, but the guilt. Thing is, guilt isn’t productive. It doesn’t help us parent better, it does add to our relationships with the first families or within our immediate family. If only I could figure out how I could deal with it better.
That should be it doesn’t add to our relationships..
Mother’s Day and the kids’ birthdays are the worst — I usually feel a mixture of guilt and sadness: guilt that I get to spend these days with my kids while their birthmothers do not and an overwhelming sense of sadness that there isn’t a way that their first families could be involved in their lives. At least right now.
There’s also the ongoing guilt that I’m not doing enough for them culture-wise (we’ve done Lunar New Year adoption group celebrations and Adam has spent the last two years in all-day Saturday Korean school but I still worry that I’m raising culturally ignorant children who are not going to fit in if they decide to spend time in Korea).
Actually, now that I think about this, there are probably a dozen other reasons I feel guilt about these adoptions. Sigh.
I’m a firm adherent to the philosophy that you can not truly know or understand joy unless you know and understand sorrow. 22 years after placing my daughter in an open adoption I still get the occasional “what if” filter into my brain but 99.99% of the time I just revel in the fact that I love her mom and dad and her brother as much as I love her. Any sorrow I had has been replaced in its entirety by love
And here’s the real clincher that lets me over-ride any residual guilt … I would not change a thing about her life and this open adoption because if I did she would not be the amazing woman she is today and I absolutely cannot bear the idea of that.
Yes, they were childless strangers when I chose them out of a stack of files but like Monika I did not do it for any other reason than that I firmly believed then (and still do now) that it was the best thing for my child to be raised by someone else. I did hang on to the guilt of feeling I was not ready to be a mom for several years afterward even though I steadfastly refused at the time to admit it was guilt that I was feeling. But, as I got older maybe I also got a bit wiser and I learned to be much more gentle with the young woman that I was. At 18 I made the best possible choice in what (at that time) was the most difficult situation I had ever faced.
My daughter’s mom once told me she felt guilt for the pain and loss I had to go through. I was so surprised. I feel nothing but gratitude & love towards my daughter’s family because their willingness to open their hearts to her gave us both the chance at a life we otherwise could not have had.
Thanks Adele. I love hearing your perspective. It’s amazing to know and hear from you considering you have seen your daughter grow up. Life is short in a lot of ways.
I feel guilt, but more of the “were we the right parents for these kids” variety. It usually crops up when they throw us a curve ball, or if I’m feeling to tired to deal with/do the emotionally heavy lifting that teens require.
Excellent post. Although I am working hard not to shoulder guilt I do not own, it is a struggle. We are on a slow journey to finalization and I am curious as to how you have your son’s original birth certificate. It boggles my mind why my son’s origins should be erased by a “new” birth certificate when we finalize, but other than making it known whenever I can, that I think this is stupid as he** … I didn’t know we had a choice.
Theo does have two birth certificates. It’s a big topic but at least he has his original.
I have no authority to add to this discussion, except to say that where there are children and parents – particularly mothers – there is guilt. I think open adoption is such a great concept in theory, but like anything, when you add real people in, it must become so much more complicated, and it blows my mind that anyone can make it work.
I think about this all the time. I’m coming from a place of having lost a child and the mourning process that went with it. I can not imagine how a birthmother must feel when giving up her child. Sometimes, I try to relate it to how much loss I felt myself but I know it’s going to be different for her. It saddens me that my pursuit of adopting a child in the future will leave a mother facing the process of loss – a pain that I have quite often said I never would wish on anyone else. Somehow, here I am waiting for a baby that is going to result in my contribution to another woman’s loss. I feel like I’m walking into it guilty sometimes…
Thought provoking post…
What an interesting perspective and one that I have not yet considered. We are in the process of adopting a child internationally and have 2 biological kids at home. I already feel guilt with them for a variety of typical parent reasons, and didn’t think about the guilt of what our adopting this little toddler girl will do to her birthparents. In our case, there’s a “middleman,” the orphanage, so we are indirectly responsible for spllitting up a family, but yikes, thank you for writing this.
I know my mom feels guilty about many things related to my brother, who is adopted. But she feels a hefty dose of mom guilt about a lot of other things, too, with regards to both her adopted son and her biological daughters. I am not an adoptive mother, but in my opinion there will always be SOMETHING for moms to feel guilty about. It must be a mom thing. Dads don’t do guilt the way we do.
Great post. Really honest and thought provoking.
Eloquent, honest and thought provoking post.
It’s not guilt I feel but deep empathy which brings its own sort of pain. True that our joy is their loss, but I do believe that true openness can help.
I would only feel guilty of I wasn’t holding up our promise, both to be the best parents we can be and to go everything we can to ensure our daughter’s birth family can be part of her life.
Great post!
Stupid autocorrect. Sorry for the typos!
Luna – You could say that we as birthmoms feel empathy as well. Every day for those adoptive parents who have either lost children they couldn’t bear in the first place, or lost children through miscarriages, etc. We understand the pain you must feel too.
You wrote exactly what I feel. I was just having this same discussion with some dear girlfriends when they asked if I was ready for another adoption. I really struggle with bringing this type of devastation and loss onto another family. I, too, have to remember that in most situations, the child would have been placed with another family and that it is NOT my fault.
Oh, man, I’ve got a post brewing which will probably take me days to write coherently about. Probably one of the most difficult relationships I have is with K’s birthmom in my heart. I never doubted for one second that she loved him and would have kept him in a heartbeat under different circumstances, and because of some idiot guy, I got to bring him home. I never felt the unbridled joy I had dreamed of in my heart, because I knew there was this loss. And strangely, for a time, I felt cheated, because no one had told me it would feel the way that it did. This utterly drunken love for this tiny infant, and such sadness and then when asked time and time again when I would have another – to go through another adoption like it was just like going to the store – hah! I know other women are better prepared to do that than I – I wish i could, but I just can’t. Actually, that’s what I feel guilty about – not having a brother or sister for him.
same here!!
Can I cross link with this post – you really opened some stuff that’s been going through my mind recently?
I don’t feel guilty about adopting, I feel guilty about adopting a child on another race. Our daughter’s birth mother was really very pragmatic about the situation. She had two children and didn’t feel she could care for our daughter properly. We’re both really at peace with her decision. However, I wonder if I can be good a good enough parent to an African American child. She’s going to live in a world that I can only try to understand. Will I be able to prepare her properly? I think all mothers need to feel guilty, and we just to have to find our reasons why. If it wasn’t this, I’m sure I would find something else!
[...] I had meant to write a post about this a while ago but it just never happened. When I found out that Steve Jobs was adopted, I was curious about the details. Lollipop Goldstein from Stirrup Queens writes about it in her review of his biography and then Harriet from See Theo Run wrote a thought-provoking post on Adoption Guilt. [...]
I’ve been thinking about this post for some time. I feel both inspired and eased by your honesty. Guilt is perhaps not the word I would embrace for me. Perhaps the words has some limitations. Let’s come up with another? A word that can capture all this guilt: about having our family come together in direct relation to another family coming apart. Our this is my family guilt–built on a world where there is no social justice if a woman/man must choose for a certain handful of reasons (economic based often–and not always by any means) that she does not have the support to be able to parent. Guilt that the child we have chosen to parent had no choice in his or her story being written this way. Guilt that we are not allowed to ever forget that these two factors collide so that we could realize our deep and unwavering desire and longing to love and parent this child for the next fifty or so years (my brother just turned 50, and my mom is still very much mothering…). For me there is also a constant fear/second guess and frustration that I am not, and will never have given the open adoption the energy, skills, room it needed to flourish from the very beginning. Guilt that I am never doing it right, or enough. And then finally the ridiculous guilt that feeling guilty is just a terrible pleasure on some messed up plane that I indulge myself in, and accomplishes nothing.
And having a safe space to say all of this is so profoundly necessary and helpful.
And now to work on moving through all of this, and realizing that I am doing my level headed best, and so are you and you and you and you. And that we re creating space to figure out how to do it even better is worthy of compassion and acknowledgement and gratitude.
Maybe it is not guilt. Maybe it is just adoption and all of its incredible layers. To embrace them all is to become better and better adoptive parents, and to create more and more space into which our children can arrive with grace, strength and wildly open and resilient hearts.
I can understand how you feel, but at least you have an open adoption so that Theo can see and have contact with this birth family. It’s kind of the best of both worlds!
[...] week I read a very moving post about adoption guilt at See Theo Run. I have been thinking about the post since then, and returned to the site to leave this response: [...]
My adopted daughter (only child) has been dismissive towards me and flat out mean almost without exception since she was about 9 years old. She is now 16. I have always been outwardly loving and affectionate to both my husband and daughter. I’ve been supportive and non-critical. I was hands on in a big way, giving up my academic career to stay at home and afford my daughter all the love and activities and time that she needed. From play dates to Gymboree to Baby Swim….
One pivotal point in our relationship came when she had just turned 9 and we were in the car talking. She asked me if it “hurt” while she was “coming out.” I explained that she always knew that our family was made by adopting her–that a young woman loved her so much that she wanted her baby to grow up with a mom and dad who both loved her and could provide well for her. Blah, blah, blah…. You know the story. We were always very open with her about all aspects of life that were developmentally appropriate.
When we arrived home, she immediately went upstairs and didn’t talk to me at all that evening. It was the start (as I see it) of mean behavior and what appears to be her hating me for adopting her and ruining her bond with her birthmother. Now–while this is not logical it is, nevertheless, the under-riding feelings I have about how she became the mean girl she is.
She has never, ever confided in me. Once after a cheer competition, all the girls came running to their families and even to other parents–her friends hugged me. I was merely going to tell her “congratulations,” as I knew that she would not accept my touching her. As I approached her down on the mat, she walked past me with one arm exteneded and pushed me out of her way. She went to her father and would not look at me. She was in middle school.
She has continued this way until now. She is a sophomore in high school and I feel guilty as sin. While she steps all over me and has delivered slaps in the face (both in public and private), I continue to feel guilty about adopting her and ruining the non-existent real life connection with her birth mother.
We adopted her in China, and there is no chance to find the mother since she was left outside the door of an orphanage.
I still love her with all my heart and soul, but I am beginning to question whether or not expecting any response from her in life is futile. She is a popular and from the looks of it, a really happy girl. Beautiful and smart. She apparently sees me as the one obstacle to true bliss.
Wonderful post. I know that I have felt this guilt since before our son was placed with us through international adoption. I know that it stems from educating myself about the horrors of IA and how coercive and sneaky agencies can be when they see dollar signs. Would I do it over again? Probably not. Am I overjoyed that I get to parent an amazing little boy? Absolutely. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge that his biological family is missing out, that he was torn from his culture and family through no fault of his own. I think if you are an adoptive parent and not wrestling with “guilt” or whatever you want to name it, you aren’t looking at the realities of adoption and what it means both at the family level and at the global level of sending countries vs receiving countries. There are some pretty nasty practices out there of which every adoptive parent should be aware.
Thanks for this post.