“I did not realize I had been so deeply coerced since the very first phone call with the adoption agency. We were introduced to the term “Birth-parents” and that’s what we had become.”
I have spent a week trying and failing to write this story. The emotion that needs to be present in this, our story threatens though to drown me, crush me. And so it does and I delete everything that I have written. And then again I am overwhelmed at the pain this brings to me. It is not an old pain that kind of stings a little still or a pain that over time has become easier to bare. It is as raw as the day slightly more than 20 years ago when this journey began. And I know now, that this pain will never be easier to take, to carry, this load will always be my greatest burden. But I share it in hopes that it will prevent it from becoming some other woman’s burden too.
I lost my son to adoption 20 years ago. I am still surprised that I survived. It would have been much easier not to have.
I grew up with my mother and the man she married when I was four, and with a half-sister they had together who was born when I was almost 5. I did not know who my father was but I did know he was not my mother’s husband. When I was just 7 my mother told me that I was the product of a rape and she even made sure that I fully understood what rape was. I lost all self-esteem I ever had that day. My mother’s husband was abusive to me, physically and emotionally. Despite this, I called him “Dad” and never told anyone that he was not my father. Outwardly most people probably thought I had an idyllic life, a big house, new cars in our driveway, vacations, and a Christmas that could not be rivaled. It appeared we had it all. Most of my friends probably thought my only problem was that my “parents” were likely too strict. My teen-age years were filled with angst and beatings for all types of perceived transgressions. Being late for curfew, a less than stellar report card, talking back, boys calling, all were an excuse to give me what he felt I had coming. What I had coming was, most often, a back hand to to the mouth, often a dive across the dinner table with both of his arms flailing at my head. One time it was him pinning me to my bed with his knees and choking me until my mother finally intervened and pulled him off me. The day after that I tried to leave. I took the GO bus and then the subway to my Aunt’s place of work in Toronto. She was willing to keep me with her, but my mother showed up to drag me back home. Even while the bruises and swelling remained on my neck she convinced herself and my grandparents and my Aunt that I was lying. And I went home. It never changed I had just turned 16 and life went on like this for almost 4 more years until I started dating my now husband. My husband witnessed the last beating I ever got. And though it was awful for him, I am glad that he did, because he knows the truth, he had to witness it with his own eyes. I left home not long after, I packed everything I owned into garbage bags and left them a note. Had I tried to leave any other way it would not have happened.
Despite leaving, and despite what I lived with my whole life, I did not know how to extricate myself from them. They controlled my life still though I didn’t live with them. My husband and I fought every week when the mandated trip for Sunday dinner would arrive, we fought every time my mother would say things to diminish my husband, and we fought every time we had to be there for every holiday and birthday. It was all a big show, I had to be there or how would they explain it to their extended family and friends if I wasn’t? We all still had to pretend to be the “happy family who had it all”. I did honestly not even realize how deeply delusional I was myself, I too played the game I had been taught my whole life.
Then in the fall of 1988 when I was 22 years old I discovered I was pregnant. I should have been happy. After all my husband and I had been together for 2 and a half years, we knew we loved each other and were committed to one another. Yes, we were a little taken aback, because we weren’t exactly planning it but it would all be okay. Then came Christmas and of course we went home to my parents. It was a Christmas like all the others, filled with Grandparents,and Aunts and Uncles and Cousins and yet something happened that Christmas Eve night when I lay in bed beside my husband with our child in my belly. I realized I was very, very afraid for the future of my child with these people in his life. He would be the first grandchild, they would take over my life, they would push my husband out of my life and most certainly out his child’s life. And I was filled with absolute despair, my child would end up reliving my life and I saw no way to make that not happen.
It was the very next day that I told my husband we were placing our child for adoption. He really had no say, I had made up my mind and that was that. I had discovered the Holy Grail that would keep my child safe from the very people I could not keep myself safe from. I decided no one need ever know I was pregnant, after all my mother had managed to hide her pregnancy with me until the day she went into full term labour and so could I. It was fairly easy to make excuses, we had moved about a 2 hour drive away from my parents and my husband worked shifts, I didn’t drive. That took care of most of the excuses.
I contacted a private adoption attorney who practiced in Ottawa, I figured that was far enough away that there would be no coincidences of anyone knowing us or my family. Right then and there the freight train began rolling and kept on picking up speed until there was no way to jump off that runaway train. They sent us a “birth-parent” counselor who became too intimate with us, she befriended us, inviting us over for dinner, calling all the time. They sent us the profiles of 5 prospective adoptive parents and with some advice from our counselor we chose a couple. As soon as we chose them they arranged for them to come from Ottawa and meet us. We met the people who were so perfect on paper and they were even more perfect in person. The prospective adoptive mother said to me “I dreamed we would get a baby in June.” I was due in June of course. We decided then and there that they would be our child’s parents. I believe it was late April or May when we met them and I was due June 22. The days leading up to my delivery were spent reading out loud to my baby and going to the Doctors appointments constantly. I had a mild case of toxemia and was ordered bed rest for the last month. June 22 came and went, and I was now seeing the Dr everyday. She finally set a date for induction of July 6th. But on the night of July 4th at 6pm just as my husband came in the door from work I had my first contraction. There was no time to even catch my breath before the next one started. We had a long drive from Georgetown where we were now living, back to Cambridge to the hospital. Despite being in heavy labour with contractions one after another, I made my husband stop at the rest stop on the 401 to call our counselor and tell her I was in labour so the adoptive parents could get to Cambridge from Ottawa as soon as possible. From the moment we had met them, they had become our child’s parents. I did not realize I had been so deeply coerced since the very first phone call with the adoption agency. We were introduced to the term “Birth-parents” and that’s what we had become. We had been introduced and chosen “freely” our “Birth-child’s” parents. And they were not us. It was re-enforced to us over and over again how incredibly awesome it was that we had met the very two people in this whole world who really were our child’s parents and that we were able to give them such “gift”, the “gift” of a child that was really theirs but who had just been put in the wrong mommy’s tummy. I ate, drank and swallowed all of their rhetoric. I was not a Mother, just a “Birthmother” I was sold a bill of goods and I still have the damned receipt.
Our beautiful baby boy was born at 2:12am on July 5th 1989 all 9lbs 10ozs of him, with no drugs. He was born with a very large hematoma on his head as the nurses continued to insist I was not ready to push for an hour and a half after I told them I needed to. I still remember the DR walking into the delivery room and taking one look at me and saying, “oh good god Denise you need to push right now!!!!” The nurses were all aware of our “adoption plan” and when our son was born they wrapped him and placed him into my husbands arms. As my husband held him, he opened his eyes for the first time and stared deeply into his fathers eyes.
Because the nurses were aware of the “adoption plan” they took our son to the nursery. Once I was in my room I buzzed the nurses station and asked that our son be brought to us so that we could feed him. After waiting and having to buzz again, a nurse came to the room and said. “we’ll feed the baby, he is after all not your baby” to which I replied, “Yes he is our baby, and yes we will feed him” They did bring him to us with a bottle finally and we held him and fed him and loved him as much as we could. We named him Jason. We both knew the whole 36 hours that we spent with our son that we did not want to give him up. But we had promised each other in a delusional fog that we would each make the other go thru with “our plan” if either of us wavered. We forced each other many times in that 36 hours to keep our commitment to our child’s “parents”. After all they had already lost a child when that child’s mother changed her mind, they had suffered miscarriages and infertility and this child, our child, was really their child. I was suffering more than I had anticipated, after all I was told over and over again what a ‘loving decision” I was making, how knowing that we were making a family’s dream come true would get us thru the “little bit of sadness we may feel”. Our birth parent counselor called my DR and the two of them decided it was time to discharge me from the hospital because I was becoming too “attached” to my “birthson”, and after all he was not really mine.
And so it was time to go, we hugged and kissed our son for the last time, said our good-byes, took him to the nursery and walked out of the hospital. We were asked to take the backstairs as I was so distraught they were afraid I would upset other patients and visitors at the hospital. And as we walked down those stairs we both truly died at that very moment. All I could hang on to was that I didn’t leave my sweet baby alone, I believed with all my heart that as I walked out the back door that his “parents” walked in the front door to take him home. ( I found out last September that they didn’t come get him until the next day despite the fact they were in town, the counselor apparently told them we would likely change our mind as she had never seen two people struggling more with their decision and it was best they not see him if we were just going to take him back)The drive home was long and painful. I did not know until that moment that it was possible to die of a broken heart. We arrived home to an empty apartment, with empty arms and souls that were crushed beyond repair. I laid in a fetal position on my kitchen floor for two days and fully expected to literally die from the pain in my heart. The phone began ringing the next day and every single day for the next 21 days, it was either the lawyer or the counselor, they would say things like “oh Denise, Michael and Edie are so happy, did you know that they went straight from the hospital to a family reunion in Muskoka. Jason has met all his aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, you have given them all such a gift.” The next day the call was “oh Denise, you wouldn’t believe how much Justin is bonding with his new baby brother, he and Jason are just delighting in one another, you must feel so incredible that you were able to complete this little family” and these phone calls came every single day for 21 days, relating their happiness, how wonderful I was, what a gift we had given them, how our sweet baby was finally with his “forever family, the family GOD had intended for him all along.” And then the calls stopped, how ironic, 21 days had passed, the time in which a mother has to change her mind and get her child back in the province of Ontario. Because there was no going back now,there was no need to call me anymore, they had done their jobs, they ensured my sweet, beautiful baby became the child of others, people who bought and paid for him. People who delighted in their own joy, with no thought for the loss my child was feeling being separated from his mother, or for his mother who was struggling to live without her heart.
I believed for 18 years that I had done the right thing. That I saved my child from people I could not save my self from. Believed I brought my son into this world to be Michael and Edie’s son. Believed he would have more than we could have ever offered him. I had to believe this to live with myself.
A month after Jason turned 18, I came home to a message on my voice mail from the lawyer. I called her back, she said “Matthew is hoping you will send him a letter and some pictures”. For a moment I thought she called the wrong “birthmother”, then I realized they had changed his name and never bothered to tell us. Not in the letters or pictures she sent when he was 3 months, 6months and 1 year old, nor even in the letter I begged for and finally received when he was 5. In all these letters she always referred to him as “Jason” the name my husband and I named him, and had wrongly assumed they kept.
We of course were thrilled to send him a letter and pictures and to tell him that he had a little sister. We received a letter from him and he said he would like to meet. We wrote again to tell him we would be happy to, but that we had to find a way to tell his little sister that she had a big brother. It was not easy to tell our daughter she had a big brother, but she was open and loving and ecstatic to have him. She was just 2 months passed her 11th birthday when she found out. They began corresponding every single day by “Facebook” 5 minutes after we told her. This was December 10th 2007. On December 31 2007 Matt called us and we all got to hear his voice for the first time. He decided he needed to see us sooner rather than later and on February 01 2008 Matt took the train from Ottawa to our home in Burlington. Reed saw him standing on the platform first and launched herself into his arms for a long embrace, you have never seen two faces that look more alike and the joy on both their faces was palpable. His dad hugged him next, and then was my turn and as I held him tight to my breast I whispered in his ear “I have missed you forever”. We spent the week-end together, laughing and crying. Taking him back to the train station on Sunday and saying good-bye was almost more than I could bare. We continued to talk to Matt everyday when he had returned to Ottawa, he came back again in March and again in April. We went to Ottawa in May to see him play his very first time on stage (he is a musician). I saw him again in June when I traveled to Quebec for a work project that took me to the very next village from the one he grew up in, and I stayed at his home and slept in his bed in the bedroom he had spent almost all of his childhood in. He came back to Burlington at the end of June to spend 19 glorious days with us in honour of his 19th birthday, the first one we had spent with him since his actual “birth day”. We spent a week in Cuba to celebrate his birthday and be together as a family. We grew closer by the day. Matt and I had been speaking on the phone multiple times per day since his first visit. He shared himself with me, fully, deeply and completely. In those phone calls and the time we spent together, I began to realize that the life he had lived was not the “more” I had hoped and wished for his whole life. Our reunion became complicated as his “mother” insisted on becoming more and involved in it. She began to send me e-mails about the amount of time we were spending on the phone, she sent e-mails telling me that I needed to tell Matt that he needed to get a job, or get his hair cut, she sent e-mails in which she was highly critical and negative about Matt which cut me to the very bone. In hindsight, I should have realized that if she was doing this to me then he was getting it 10 times worse. But I was determined that I would never be the cause of making Matt feel divided loyalties and so I kept my mouth shut and never said a word.
November came and I received a nasty e-mail from Michael, his “father”. In the e-mail he blamed me for Matt dropping out of college, for not getting job, for our family being too much a presence in his life and basically told me to back off. Matt and I talked about this and he assured me this was not how he felt at all. But I could honestly feel the tension in his voice when we talked. I realized he had been given an ultimatum and that it was basically choose “us or them”. Not that Matt would ever say so because he does feel a tremendous amount of loyalty to them especially to his “dad”.
There is so much more I could write but I have to leave it at this. I spoke to my son last in January. I have not heard from him since. His “mother” changed their phone number at their home in Ottawa, and he does not answer his cell phone. We have sent him e-mails and left messages for him at his home in Quebec. He does not even return his sisters calls. I know in my heart of hearts that this is not what he wants, but what he feels he must do. It is now a day before the first of October 2009 and all I can do is hope that he knows he is loved, that we want him in our lives, and that one day he will find the courage to come back to us.
I cannot stress enough how much I regret my decision to place my son for adoption. I realize now that I had been duped and coerced into believing that someone else could better parent my child than I. That someone else deserved him more than I. That I could cure some woman’s infertility with the “gift” of my child.
I should have been stronger, and braver for my child. I should have run as far and as fast as I could with him in my arms and realized that my husband and I were the best “gift” we could have given our child. His Real parents, people who looked like him and understood him because he is just like us. If only someone had told me that 20 years ago maybe it would have drowned out the other voices that were determined to take my child.