She was sitting in the hospital bed with her knees bent up to her chest, hair pulled up in a messy bun. Her eyes were squeezed closed and her face was twisted into the deepest agony I have ever seen. Next to her was her mom, eyes red from crying, but a beautiful smile on her face, and in her arms was her tiny grandson, just born, who was being given up for adoption.
I felt like I was intruding looking at this picture, like it wasn’t for me to see. It was so private, so raw, so heartbreaking. In fact, when I scrolled to the picture, I gasped and grabbed my heart and looked away as tears sprang to my eyes. A beautiful mother whose heart was breaking as she held the baby boy she could not keep.
I know so many who are adopted or who have adopted, and it’s wonderful and beautiful and it creates families. This is my first time seeing the other side, seeing the mom who had to make an impossible choice, of seeing the family that was being ripped apart.
The mother is my friend’s sister. She is over 30 but she suffers from mental illness and is not in a position to raise the baby. The family has stepped up and offered to help her, but she has declined. I think she is afraid. She has a long history of getting well and staying on her meds, but will stop taking them and destroy everything in her path. Her pregnancy came just as she was coming out of her last episode of being off medication where she went on a months-long journey that saw her lose a job, become homeless, doing who knows what to survive while rejecting family’s help or burning bridges with the ones she did seek out.
She couldn’t be on her medication during the pregnancy and decided early on that she wanted to continue with the pregnancy and give the baby up. She found the family on her own. She tried working with an agency but found it to be too much, being given a dozen profile books at once and called daily by the agency. She suffered through a dark depression during the pregnancy, but her mother put her on a schedule to eat and fed her so she could nourish the baby. The adoptive family was at the hospital with her and named the baby upon his birth. But the mother went to visit him very day in the NICU (he was born at 36 weeks and needed a little extra care.)
She told her sister “I am a monster for giving my baby up, for not keeping him”. I told my friend, “Please, you have to tell her she is not a monster. She sacrificed her own health to carry him, to give him the best chance. Tell her that she has made the most selfless decision she ever could have made. She is not a monster; she is a mother.”
Oh this is heartbreaking. I can picture the scene and it has got to be so hard for her. She will think about that baby boy every day of her life I'm sure....but has made another family so happy. It's so hard.
ReplyDeleteSo heartbreaking. But a reminder that love comes in many forms. We need them all.
ReplyDeleteI vividly remember the day I picked my little guy up at the hospital. I stood there in awe of this precious little boy but also thinking of his momma and how sad she must be to leave the hospital with empty arms. It is the bitter-sweet of adoption. My happiness came at the cost of someone else's immense loss. It helped me to be more sympathetic towards the kids mother as we navigated through the ups and downs of the foster care system. It will be four years next week, but I still remember the nervous excitement and sadness of that day in the hospital. Best wishes to your friend's sister. I hope she has a good support system to help her through this loss.
ReplyDelete