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What is love?

I was reading comments to a post on FB and this post got me to thinking...


"It is a really awful message to send that if you love someone you have to abandon them... That isn't what love is about. Why is it in the world outside of adoption, love is fighting for the person you love and doing anything you can to keep them with you but in adoption that message is completely contradicted and mothers are told if they love their kids they will hand them to total strangers? Why can no one see how wrong that is? I don't doubt women who are vulnerable will fall for that as pregnancy is a time of great vulnerability as hormones are way up the pole and so the love for our children is used against us - if you love him/her you will give them up which sends the message that if you do the normal thing mothers are supposed to do, you don't love your child. What a head job for both mother and child. Only in adoption do we see these messages; an institution that contradicts everything we are taught from birth..."
J Blackwell


I have never before hear it stated so perfectly. When you love someone as fiercely as a Mother loves her child, you fight to the death to keep them with you. You are told or it is implied all your life that this is what loving someone is. So how is it that I love my baby if I am leaving my baby behind? I think this is something I am still struggling with. 
And then there is the opposite...
My next pregnancy after relinquishment I was so conflicted in all the feelings and emotions running through my head. I was still somewhat in a state of shock about all that had happened so I wasnt able to voice any of it to begin to heal. How could I be a good Mother to this child I was carrying if love meant giving him away...but I wasnt. I was keeping him.  Of course at the time these thoughts werent as clear as they are now looking back but I believe it had something to do with why I held back from bonding with him. I was a horrible mother 



5 comments:

  1. In a nut shell.. yes. And in Adoption WE< the MOTHERS< become what we must protect our children against.. at least that's who it is twisted; You might resonate with this post where i expand on that.. quite a bit: http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/the-choice-in-adoption-innocence-idiotic-irrevocable-2/

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  2. I found out when my "birth" daughter was around 16 that the way she was able to be adopted was for me to have legally abandoned her, with the intent not to return. Now, that may seem naive, but it was NEVER explained to me that by signing the papers, it was saying I was walking away never to return...abandonment. It threw me into a deep depression. You don't abandon someone you love more than life! I felt sucker punched in the gut. It just never occurred to me that it happened the way it did...I just thought I was transferring custody from me to the adoptive parents. Dumb, huh? I believe as a mother I had a right and the agency had an obligation to explain the legalities to me, but they never did. I was declared an "abandoner" in the eyes of the law :( Even I can't reconcile that it my mind...this child I loved and would have given my life for (and essentially did) was abandoned by me, her own mother.

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  3. Wow!! I have heard of some states doing it this way as well...maybe I need to go look at my papers again!! Im so sorry that put that brand on you!

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  4. Huh...you got papers? I never got anything. When I went back 12 yrs. ago to look through my file at the agency, I had to sign a paper promising I wouldn't sue them. Then, my good friend the social worker (who helped steal my baby from me) just read what she had on me. No one offered me any papers of any kind though.

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    1. I think it might be a state thing. I have heard of some Moms getting copies of what they signed and others not.

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