Grief and Healing, or Something Like That

I don't know if any of you know this about me, but sometimes I like to talk about grief. And by "sometimes" I mean "at least once a week for the past three or four years." It's kind of become my thing. I guess that's okay.

I gave a presentation at the national FSA conference on grief and healing (as they pertain to birth mothers). I think it went okay. And then, because it was easier than coming up with something new, I gave that same presentation at the regional conference last month. I've had several (and by "several" I mean, "as many as two") people ask me for an outline of my presentation. And since I have been too busy/lazy to blog lately, I thought I would finally give in and post it on my blog. In an effort to stretch out my laziness, I'm going to split it into more than one post. Also, it's kind of long, and I think my eyes would glaze over if I had to sit and read the whole thing, and I wrote it. So I'm assuming that no one else wants to sit here for thirty minutes squinting at a computer screen. Even though some of you probably do that anyway, playing Farmville or watching cat videos on YouTube (my favorite is this one) or whatever it is that people do on-line for the 4-6 hours a day that Google says we're spending.

Wow. Isn't it a shame when bad things happen to good sentences? Let's move on.

So, here it is. My thoughts on grief and healing, as I wrote and presented them (with a few clarifications and additions), minus the insightful comments that other people made during my presentations. Sorry about that. I should have taken notes.



If you've wasted as much time as I have on-line looking at baby animal pictures, you may have seen a photo or two with the caption “You're doing it wrong.” A kitten with its nose in the pages of a book may accompany the line “Facebook: you're doing it wrong.”

You may feel at times like, “Grief: you're doing it wrong.” But the odds are, you're doing it right, because what's wrong for someone else may be right for you. How many of you have ever felt like you were grieving placement improperly: too long, too short, too much, not enough?

[Here I paused for a show of hands]

No two birth moms are going to grieve exactly the same, and that's okay. The intensity and duration of your grief aren't as important as what you get out of it – its productivity. Grief can and should be productive. As long as it's moving you forward in some way, you're doing it right. You won't find yourself moving forward very much at first. Grief is more of a reflex. It's up to you to make it work for you.

And it is work! It's neither easy nor fun, but the only way out, as they say, is through. You can push it back, stuff it down, box it up all you want, but eventually it's going to have to be dealt with. I recommend starting now! It won't get any easier. But it's important.

How many of you have felt like you shouldn't be grieving at all?

[Here, again, I paused for a show of hands]

I think sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that because adoption was the right choice, it shouldn't hurt, that maybe we don't have a right to be sad. But the thing is, we do have a right to be sad. We need to be sad. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross* said, “Grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. We think we want to avoid the grief, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid. Grief is the healing process that ultimately brings us comfort in our pain. That pain and our love are forever connected.”

When I think of the kind of life I want to live, I think of my Savior. He set a perfect example for us. Do you all remember that short scripture that's so easy to quote? “Jesus wept.” If He wept, I think it's okay for us to weep, too. Emotions - the full gamut of them - are a gift from God. Embrace them.

Give yourself permission to grieve. It is a perfectly healthy response to any kind of loss. I had a birth mom tell me once that she felt selfish for being sad, because she knew adoption was right for her baby. If any of you share that belief, I want to disabuse you of it. Your grief is NOT selfish. You grieve because you love, and it is the most selfless love in the world.

The world won't always understand this. For example: when my father died, my mom was treated with sympathy, kindness, patience, and understanding. No one accused her of being selfish for her sadness. On the other hand, after I placed, people told me I was being self-centered, that I needed to stop thinking about my own pain and do something for someone else, that I needed to snap out of it and move on already. It goes without saying that that kind of attitude isn't very helpful or respectful. If you've been on the receiving end of that kind of “advice,” please disregard it. You need to grieve just as much as someone who has lost a spouse.

Placement is a death, in a way. Your baby is gone – he or she no longer exists. In their place is someone else's baby. And you're not just grieving one single moment of loss but a lifetime of things that won't be as the child grows up - or, rather, things that will be, but without you.


I hope you like depressing cliffhangers, because that's it for part 1! Part 2, which deals with the specific aspects of grief, will be up in a few days :)



*Quote taken from "On Grief and Grieving," by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

In Which December is Also Adoption Month

I feel kind of bad that I hardly blogged at all for National Adoption Month. I feel like I should have had SOMETHING to say about it, being a birth mother and all. But I guess that's part of why I didn't say more - I am a birth mother. Every month is adoption month for me :)

It's like that for anyone who's been through something big. There might be a day or a month for cancer or adoption or civil rights or anything else. But whereas most people think about it for a day or a month, if it's personal for you, every single day is, for instance, National Adoption Day. It's not a once-a-year occasion.

I don't specifically think of adoption every single day, but I do think of Roo and, as I placed her, adoption is in there somewhere. I can't separate Roo from adoption. Without adoption, I wouldn't be blogging right now. I'd be chasing a two-year-old around, trying to keep her from breaking the ornaments on my Christmas tree.

Or not. It's the weekend, so I might not have custody of Roo today; H would. I know that having to share custody would have broken my heart. I try to remember that kind of thing whenever I get these rosy ideas about what being Roo's mother would be like. I wouldn't even get to be her mother full-time - and not just because of H. I would probably be at work today, because if I'd chosen to parent Roo, I'd be working at least two jobs to try to keep afloat. I'd have to. I mean, I'm falling under as it is with the one job I'm working now, and I only have to take care of me. I can't imagine trying to take care of someone else.

It's just ... I love her. I think I'm always going to imagine what one thing or another would be like, even though I know my imagination glosses over the reality of what it would be like. I can't help but think about her, and I can't help but miss her.

It's not always a terribly sad thing. And over time, it's become something that isn't always Roo-specific. I miss having a baby and I miss being a mother in general.

I've been told by more than one birth mother that I'm lucky because I "got to" parent Roo for a couple of months before I placed her, that they're jealous. I hate hearing that. I feel like it diminishes the difficulty of placement - like it was a breeze because I got to spend time with Roo first, or like I was always going to place her but I parented first just to see what it was like. Whenever I hear placement stories, birth moms say things about how they cherished their time in the hospital because they knew it was their only time with the baby they were going to place. They often say that they wished they had more time.

Sometimes I selfishly wish I'd had less. Not that I would ever, for anything in the world, take back a single second I spent with my baby when she was mine. But the fact that I hadn't previously made an adoption plan, that I planned to be and was in fact Roo's mother, that made it so much harder for me to place her. [I want to specify here that I'm not saying that it was any harder for me to place than it was for anyone else, but that parenting first made adoption harder for me personally.] I knew exactly what it was that I was going to miss. I had been not just a mother but Roo's mother. If I hadn't been above 100% certain about P and M, I never could have placed.

But as I said, I have moments these days where it's not baby Roo that I miss entirely; it's motherhood. I have always wanted to be a mother. I worry sometimes that Roo was my only shot at motherhood. Sometimes I feel okay with that. Sometimes I think, "Roo is enough. The time I had as her mother was enough. If that's all I ever get, I'm okay with that." Other times all I can think is how grossly unfair life is. The key is balancing those times, making sure the former is more common than the latter. I'm not quite there yet.

But I'm getting better.

Guest Blog Alert!

Today I have a guest post up at Genuinely Jarman. You can read it HERE. It's nothing deep or earth-shattering (not that much of what I write ever is!). I had a few thoughts recently about little things that I didn't expect when I became a birth mother and I wrote them down, and you can read them if you click above.

And that's about it.

Out

I outed myself at church* a few weeks ago.

I'd been feeling this itch for weeks that I needed to speak up about adoption in my ward. I'd let several opportunities pass by because I didn't know how people would take what I had to say. Finally, the first Sunday of the month, I got up to share my testimony. Normally when I get up, I have an idea of what I want to say. If I don't focus my thoughts ahead of time, I end up tripping on my words and stuttering and it's pretty thoroughly embarrassing. But that day, all I could think was, I need to get up. I need to speak.

I feel like someone in the congregation needed to know that I'm a birth mom. I don't know who and I don't know why, but now they know. I don't remember everything I said, but I know that I talked about how much God loves us, and how our greatest heartaches can bring us our greatest blessings, and then the words flew out of my mouth - "Two years ago I placed a child for adoption."

You want people to sit up and take notice? Announce to a group of ostensibly abstinent people, a group to which you belong, that you once got into a little bit of trouble. One girl actually did literally sit up. I had to smother a laugh.

I like to think that I managed a decent segue from my blurt back into God's love, but I don't remember. All I know is that it's out, and I'm out, and my goodness, but it's a relief! I wish I'd said something sooner. It wasn't as scary as I thought.

Here's the thing - I'm not ashamed of being a birth mom. I think that having Roo and placing her are the absolute best things I've ever done and that I'll ever do. I am proud of the choice I made, and I am ridiculously proud of my little girl.

Keeping silent about my story - not speaking up when I've wanted to in the past - feels like an act motivated by shame, and that's not how I feel. I mean, I do try to choose my words carefully, and I certainly don't introduce myself to people by telling them I'm a birth mother. My adoption story, mine and Roo's, is a precious burden - it's the most sacred thing I have ever been a part of, and I want to do it justice, to explain things the right way when it feels like the proper course of action. But whatever my reasons for keeping things to myself, my silence can be interpreted as shame.

I'm done letting people think I'm ashamed of these things that I've done. If people decide to take my story wrong, to focus on my mistakes instead of the good, then that's their choice. But they're not going to misunderstand my love for Roo or the choice that I made. I am speaking up because I love her.



*Some of the words in this post might be confusing to my readers unfamiliar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So I've included relevant links in a few words to help explain what I'm talking about. Move the mouse around to find them :)

Lucky

I've been on sort of a ranting kick lately. I'm sorry about that.

It's easy to fall into the trap of ranting about things because when it comes to adoption, there's never a shortage of misunderstandings, improper terminology, and wrong ideas. I sometimes feel the burden of educating people, correcting their misconceptions, giving them right ideas.

But I don't like ranting all the time, and I can't imagine that anyone likes to read it all the time. I certainly don't want Roo to think, when she's older, that I'm the sort of person who spends most of her time on a soapbox. I'm really not. I'm fairly even-keeled as far as temperament goes (no, really!).

I feel the need to step back today, to cut through the clever (to me) turns of phrase and the whining. Because that's not how I feel today, or even most days. What I feel is grateful - so very, very grateful!

I am acutely aware that my adoption situation is what many people would consider a best-case scenario. Adoption was 100% my choice; I wasn't lied to or coerced or forced in any way. I have a great relationship with P and M. I get e-mail and pictures and videos and visits. I get to see firsthand how clever and happy and absolutely darling my little Roo is, and how she is thriving. I have my blog as an outlet, and my support group as a collective shoulder to lean on. I've been able to process my grief for the most part.

There are a lot of birth parents out there who aren't as lucky. I don't know how they do it.

I'm grateful that I don't know. I'm grateful that things have worked out the way they have. I'm grateful for what a wonderful life Roo and her family have, for how happy they all are and how much they love each other. I'm grateful for the gift of adoption. Although I have days where I miss Roo a lot, I try not to take my situation for granted. I try not to let a single day pass without reminding myself that I have an awful lot to be thankful for.

I am a lucky girl.

Guest Post

Today I have a guest post up over at Portrait of an Adoption. If you haven't read this blog before, you should definitely start. Carrie is an adoptive mother who writes beautifully about the ups and downs of adoption. She is featuring a guest post on her blog each day in November to celebrate National Adoption Month, and today is my day. Click *here* to read it.

I do want to add a caveat. My post is about the pain of placement, and I didn't try to pretty up the feelings. But I do not feel any of that pain now. I left that dark beast behind me. I am in such a good place with things. So when you're reading, please keep in mind that the pain I described was temporary, that I got through it, that I'm happy now, and that it was absolutely worth it.