Normally for these posts, I have a hard time deciding what to write about. Today...not so much. It's an important weekend for mothers everywhere. It is the first full weekend of May which means Mother's Day is tomorrow. Normally, you'd think that's what I would write about. While I have full intentions of writing about it tomorrow, There's an important topic for discussion today. Not many people are aware of it, but the day before Mother's Day has been designated in recent years as Birth Mother's Day.
I guess a proper definition of Birth Mother is probably required. A birth mother is a woman who gave birth and placed her child in another woman's arms to raise. She is a woman who cannot, for one reason or another, raise her child herself. She has so much love for her child that she wants what's best and places her child with someone else.
I've had a bit of trepidation about this day. Personally, I didn't like thinking that we were any different from regular moms. I'm still not too fond of it, but I see the reasoning behind it. Birth mothers are, by definition, different. Having a day set aside that is separate from Mother's day is a way for some people to acknowledge the sacrifice made by every birth mother. Kind of like Veteran's Day or Memorial Day. Some of the girls who are birth mothers need that kind of recognition. I'm not really one of them.
My story has been an open book since it happened. At first, when I would tell people I'd placed my daughter in another woman's arms to raise, it was for sympathy. I wanted people to feel sorry for me. I wasn't ready to forgive myself for what I had perceived I'd "done", so their admiration for this great feat I'd accomplished acted as a buffer. That has since changed, thankfully. I tell my story so other people will understand something they might not have before. I mentioned a little bit of it in my post about abortion and I want to fill in some gaps now. I will try not to be too terribly long winded, but this is a story that takes some explaining.
Naturally, there are some aspects that I won't lay bare simply because they are things I don't think people want to know. However, this all started around February of 2005. I was spending a lot of time with a new friend who was a convert to the church. She'd just begun attending the local singles ward and we'd hit it off really well. She stayed at my house all the time. Around February, she told me her dog had had puppies and invited me to go see them. The puppies were at the house of the family she'd lived with when she joined the church. She's left her dog there when she moved out so that's where the puppies were. That was where I first met Josh.
I'd heard rumors about Josh at church. His brother was in my Sunday School class and rumors followed the family everywhere. Most of them were about Josh and most of them were not favorable. My friend warned me after I met him that Josh was trouble. I chose to give him a chance rather than listen to what other people had to say about him. I played the part of girl-who-thinks-she-can-change-a-guy perfectly. You see, Josh was a drug addict. I'm not talking a little weed here and there. I'm talking hard core crystal meth. For anyone who doesn't know, crystal meth is "poor man's cocaine". It's made from things like battery acid and the household cleaners you find under your sink. Gross. I know.
When we started dating, we started misbehaving. We were being immoral from day one. I could go into a lot of detail about why I stayed with him for almost a full year and why I gave him the most precious thing I could give a man, but that would take a while and I'm sure you don't want to read a therapy report. The abbreviated version is I have a very loving heart. I was crushed by the realization of what I'd given up and felt like I could no longer do any better or offer anyone else anything in regards to love. I stayed with him for that reason. I didn't think anyone else, meaning any other man, would ever want me. This at the age of 19. From the beginning, Josh and his mom told me that the doctors had told them he would never father children. Looking back, I'm not sure I believe that. Either way, we didn't use protection and were ok for nearly a year. In November of 2005, right after my older brother got home from his mission to the Phillipines, I started getting morning sickness.
I knew two weeks before I actually went to confirm with a doctor that I was pregnant. I think my parents knew too. Josh was in rehab and I was beyond terrified of what I was going to have to face. I'm a passive person by nature anyway so having to deal with what I saw as a MASSIVE confrontation scared the pooey out of me. I asked my mom to come with me to the appointment because I was so scared. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was the best idea, but you can't really plan for these things. Here's the disclaimer for this post: My family is amazing. There is no handbook on how to deal with finding out your child is expecting his/her own child, and it's not really a joyous thing when the situation is what mine was. They handled it the best the could and did remarkably well considering the circumstances.
When the doctor said the test was positive, I just about died. I remember not hearing much after she said that. Everything went fuzzy. I remember getting in the car and seeing that my mom was on the phone talking to LDS Social Services. I had much less control over my emotions when I was younger anyway, but compounded with pregnancy and I was the Texas Giant of roller coasters. Mom was the Stake Relief Society president at the time and called the director of the LDSS branch in Carrollton. She called him directly and told him she had a daughter that would be coming to see him soon. I'm a red head. We skip angry and go straight to livid. I didn't want anyone planning my future and still have a bad habit of bucking against what someone tells me I should do, even if it's good for me. I was so focused on who was right that I forgot to pay attention to what was right. There were a lot of fights and a lot of tearful discussions between me and my parents about what should be done. We held off telling my siblings for a few weeks, but we all understood that we wouldn't be able to hide it for long.
I am trying to be abbreviated, but I think this part of the story is worth telling. It demonstrates just how blessed I am with the siblings I have: We had a family meeting where I sort of blurted out that I was pregnant and Dad asked everyone how they felt. It took a lot of years for my older brother and I to see eye to eye on what happened, but we are on the same wave length now. At the time, he had an interesting way of saying he hoped that I would learn my lesson and never make this mistake again. My sister was an angel and told me she would support me no matter what I decided to do. It was my younger brothers' reactions that blew me away. As soon as I said that I was pregnant, all three of my younger brothers reached out to physically offer their support in whatever way they could. Rayo held my left hand, Remi wrapped his arms around my legs, and Nick got up and sat next to me, laying his head on my shoulder. When it was their turn to share how they felt, all three of them said they would help me with anything I decided to do. Rayo said he and Nick would share their room with the baby and keep it clean and help get up in the middle of the night to feed what they immediately dubbed as Tiny Tim. Yeah. I didn't ask them to do that and neither did anyone else. They offered.
Ok. So fast forward a little. A few months later we found out that Tiny Tim was actually a Tiny Tina. I broke up with Josh, finally, and things settled into a semi routine. I was still leary of adoption and chose not to choose anything. I avoided making any decision about the baby for as long as I could. When Josh started threatening violence to me and my family, things started happening.
My foster brother, Mike, married into a wonderful family. I love his wife and her family so much. Her mom in particular has been a unfailing rock for me. She works with an adoption agency in Utah. When Mike found out I was pregnant, he put Karen on my path. She tried calling me a few times and I resisted. I finally relented around the beginning of May 2006. She got me connected with the office and it was decided that for my protection and the protection of my daughter and my family, I would move to Utah for the last three months of my pregnancy.
The move to Utah was emotional, but so was everything about the situation I'd found myself in. I hadn't really decided for myself that adoption was what I wanted, but I am passive. Remember? I did what I was told. Mom wanted me to go to therapy with their counselor because it was offered and it was free. I resisted. She had dad talk to me for two hours. Honestly, I don't remember much about the conversation except that I wanted it to be over. I do remember agreeing to go at the end so I could end the call. Sorry, dad. But, I made a promise. So I called the agency and set up an appointment to go see Theresa. The first question she asked me was why I'd gone to therapy. I told her that I'd promised my parents I'd go. She told me later that she knew right then I was a special case and that I was going to eventually be fine. I'd told her a truth right from the beginning.
Being pregnant and single is not easy. I had a lot of free time on my hands to think and do nothing. Somehow, the agency took a special interest in me. I found out I was the first topic of discussion at almost every board meeting for the entire month I was there. They wanted to make sure I was involved in the activities they set up for the other birth mothers there. I wanted none of it and Theresa knew it. She told them, in no uncertain terms, that they were not allowed to push me to do anything I didn't want to do. She knew I was being pushed and pulled by everyone and she wouldn't allow anyone else to do any more.
Fast forward again. At the beginning of August, I had still not chosen a family to place my child with. I hadn't found the one I felt fit the best. I'd made two selections already, but the first one declined and the second couldn't afford the private agency. Theresa showed me a portfolio of a family who'd submitted their packets a week before. They'd been planning on adopting from China and, for then unknown reason, had had duplicate, notorized copies of all their paperwork made. Things that normally would have taken months were set and ready for me to choose them when I got their profile. I thought about them for a week before actually choosing them.
Last fast forward. I can't tell you what it's like to carry a life inside you for nine months and then finally meet that little person. Mom flew in barely in time for me to go into labor...we're talking like, three hours before labor started was when she landed. I'd made a promise to wait for her and Karen (not like I have ANY control over that) and I did just that. When mom got there, that was it. She was ready to come out. She was done waiting. Mom, Karen, and Theresa were in the delivery room when it came time for Liza to be born. It took some doing, because I had an epidural, but Liza was born just before 11 pm on September 3, 2006. You know those movies where a woman gives birth and then falls back and starts crying? That was me. I was relieved that the physical pain was over. Yeah. Not so much. I chose to hold my baby girl and spend as much time with her as I could. Mike came and took baby pictures in the hospital at 2 in the morning for me. Mom got to spend some time with her and so did Karen. My older brother and Mikes family also got to come to the hospital and see my baby girl.
The rest of the physical pain that I alluded too began when the adoptive family came to the hospital to meet me and Liza for the first time. That's when it started hitting me. I could feel what was coming like it was a Mack truck hauling logs going 80 miles an hour. So, I left the hospital and had to leave her there overnight. They had to run some tests and I didn't think I would have to check her out. Two days after she was born, the day after I was released, I signed relinquishment. I got a call later that afternoon, when I was visiting with a very dear friend, Leslie, asking me to go back to the hospital to check her out. I asked if we could have a little more time with her. Luckily, my nurse from the last two days was there and had no problem letting me see her for 45 minutes. She slept on my chest the whole time, curled up and content to listen to me talk. At the end of that 45 minutes...that's when the worst hurt happened. I started crying when they said it was time to go. It took everything I had to put that little girl back in the hospital bed. When I finally pulled her head away from my chest, it literally felt like I was tearing a hole in my chest and my heart was going with her. I felt like I was drowning. The nurse saw what was happening and pulled me into as tight a hug as she could manage. She said, "I don't even know you that well, and I love you so much."
My recovery took years. There is a whole two months of 2006 that I don't remember. I took a nose dive for a full two years and it took me a long time to pull myself out of the trouble I went looking for. Now, almost five years later, I am a lot happier than I've ever been. Being a birth mother sets me apart from a lot of people, but not in a bad way. I have learned a great deal about myself. I've also been able to give life to an incredible little girl and a little girl to a family who couldn't have any more kids. There's still a stigma against adoption, sadly. Maybe that's why they created Birth Mother's day. Either way, speaking as someone who's been there, giving a child up for adoption is not taking the easy way out. It's something you live with for the rest of your life. It's not something you forget. It's an act of love. Pure and simple. We do it because we love our children so much. They deserve everything we can give them. Sometimes, the best thing for a child, is not us.
I hope that this has enlightened someone. I know it'll probably be shocking for some that I put my story on such a public forum, so please forgive me for shocking you. I want people to understand and the way I explain is through story telling. Now you know what it means to be a birth mother. We really aren't so different. We just made different choices.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Communication
Epic fail for me. I started writing this post twice about two different subjects in the last two weeks and I didn't post either of them. I guess I was just waiting for something to really click. Hopefully I can pull it off this week.
The thing that's on my mind most this week is communication...or more specifically, the lack thereof. We have slowly begun to lose our ability to actually communicate things. We rely on our technological advances to assist us with communicating and we don't remember what it's like to say things face to face. Yeah. Huge problem.
Communication is essential to our success as people. We can't get anywhere in life without communicating with someone. We communicate with random people on a daily basis. We communicate with people at the grocery store, or at a restaurant, or through our jobs. That kind of communication is fairly easy. It doesn't make us delve any deeper than what's on the surface..."small talk". The communication I'm talking about is meaningful conversations with people we care about or that care about us. That kind of communication has been disappearing from our lives.
Think about the last time you had a real, in depth conversation with someone. Not the texting or over the phone kind of conversation, but the kind where you're sitting in a room together talking. It doesn't happen much anymore. That kind of contact is left to mobile phones and online social networking. We have "in-depth" conversations with our computers and phones. The question then becomes: why do we spend so much time texting, tweeting, and facebooking when we run much less risk of being misunderstood or misrepresented if we'd just visit with someone?
I think that we are losing our communication skills because we are losing our courage and becoming too dependent on devices that let us "stay connected". Let me start with the losing our courage part. I believe that we are losing courage because we don't have to use it anymore. I've always been taught, and have unfortunately had the chance to prove to myself, that if you don't use a gift, you lose the ability to use it. I play the piano. I find it difficult to play things that used to be easy if I don't practice with some form of regularity. Math? I hated it in school and dropped it outside of school. Now it's murder to try and do some of the things I was taught. The same holds true for courage.
Eleanor Roosevelt said: "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" This kind of applies to communication and today's societal view of communication. When you're face-to-face with someone, you see every facet of their features. If you're good at it, you can tell what a person is thinking just by looking at them. Here's how it ties into courage: When you tell someone how you feel, you have to be witness to the reaction. Not every reaction is good. For me, communicating what I think and feel is difficult because I don't like making people unhappy, and that includes myself. The risk that someone will be hurt is always something I consider and why I often keep my mouth shut.
For example, I went to see an old friend of mine at the end of last year. It was on the way home from visiting my family in Utah, and I hadn't seen him in 11ish years. I was okay with just sitting and listening to him tell me about his life. He was not. He wanted me to talk about my own life. We had been interested in each other, as much as is possible at 13 and 14, and that played a part in what I was willing to say and what I was nervous to divulge. As a result, I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out what to say. The fact that I couldn't say anything was odd for both of us. Why? We'd reconnected on Facebook and had no problems talking over emails and text messages. We both said a lot then. In person, I was very aware of the risk I took by telling him anything that might have meant something. It was terrifying and I was afraid of his reaction. I chickened out. You're gonna laugh at me if you haven't already when I tell you what happened next. When I left, I sent him a text and told him I wasn't normally like that and that I owed him a better night next time I came through. I couldn't even tell him that when I was leaving. I had to wait until I was on my way home and there was no risk I might get hurt.
Don't worry. I'm laughing at myself.
The reasons I listed earlier for our lack of communicating abilities are kind of dependent on each other. I don't believe it's a good idea to blame a decline in our society on the advancement in technologies because I don't believe guns kill people. In my opinion, technology is like a gun. It is a tool that assists someone in doing something less than savory. In this case, because we are so dependent on our technology, it causes a loss in courage like I already discussed. Let me elaborate on the technology end a little even though I've already touched on it.
It is part of the human experience to experience what technology doesn't allow us to. What's the point of living a life where there is no confrontation or no reason to risk everything? That's what these social media and texting outlets are leading us too. In a world where we don't have to face someone and TALK to them, who would choose to do exactly that? It's much safer to hide behind a phone or a website. There is no chance of letting someone see the damage they've done that way. I, myself, am more inclined to say what I feel behind the safety of a phone or website. Realizing what I have in writing this and doing my research for it, that's not all I want to do anymore. There's a strange exhilaration in communicating the way we were meant too. I dare you too try it. Put aside your phone and your facebook and tell someone something important. It doesn't matter what the outcome is. The fact that you have courage enough to attempt it is all you're looking for. That way, the next time you need to talk to someone, you won't be afraid.
The thing that's on my mind most this week is communication...or more specifically, the lack thereof. We have slowly begun to lose our ability to actually communicate things. We rely on our technological advances to assist us with communicating and we don't remember what it's like to say things face to face. Yeah. Huge problem.
Communication is essential to our success as people. We can't get anywhere in life without communicating with someone. We communicate with random people on a daily basis. We communicate with people at the grocery store, or at a restaurant, or through our jobs. That kind of communication is fairly easy. It doesn't make us delve any deeper than what's on the surface..."small talk". The communication I'm talking about is meaningful conversations with people we care about or that care about us. That kind of communication has been disappearing from our lives.
Think about the last time you had a real, in depth conversation with someone. Not the texting or over the phone kind of conversation, but the kind where you're sitting in a room together talking. It doesn't happen much anymore. That kind of contact is left to mobile phones and online social networking. We have "in-depth" conversations with our computers and phones. The question then becomes: why do we spend so much time texting, tweeting, and facebooking when we run much less risk of being misunderstood or misrepresented if we'd just visit with someone?
I think that we are losing our communication skills because we are losing our courage and becoming too dependent on devices that let us "stay connected". Let me start with the losing our courage part. I believe that we are losing courage because we don't have to use it anymore. I've always been taught, and have unfortunately had the chance to prove to myself, that if you don't use a gift, you lose the ability to use it. I play the piano. I find it difficult to play things that used to be easy if I don't practice with some form of regularity. Math? I hated it in school and dropped it outside of school. Now it's murder to try and do some of the things I was taught. The same holds true for courage.
Eleanor Roosevelt said: "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" This kind of applies to communication and today's societal view of communication. When you're face-to-face with someone, you see every facet of their features. If you're good at it, you can tell what a person is thinking just by looking at them. Here's how it ties into courage: When you tell someone how you feel, you have to be witness to the reaction. Not every reaction is good. For me, communicating what I think and feel is difficult because I don't like making people unhappy, and that includes myself. The risk that someone will be hurt is always something I consider and why I often keep my mouth shut.
For example, I went to see an old friend of mine at the end of last year. It was on the way home from visiting my family in Utah, and I hadn't seen him in 11ish years. I was okay with just sitting and listening to him tell me about his life. He was not. He wanted me to talk about my own life. We had been interested in each other, as much as is possible at 13 and 14, and that played a part in what I was willing to say and what I was nervous to divulge. As a result, I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out what to say. The fact that I couldn't say anything was odd for both of us. Why? We'd reconnected on Facebook and had no problems talking over emails and text messages. We both said a lot then. In person, I was very aware of the risk I took by telling him anything that might have meant something. It was terrifying and I was afraid of his reaction. I chickened out. You're gonna laugh at me if you haven't already when I tell you what happened next. When I left, I sent him a text and told him I wasn't normally like that and that I owed him a better night next time I came through. I couldn't even tell him that when I was leaving. I had to wait until I was on my way home and there was no risk I might get hurt.
Don't worry. I'm laughing at myself.
The reasons I listed earlier for our lack of communicating abilities are kind of dependent on each other. I don't believe it's a good idea to blame a decline in our society on the advancement in technologies because I don't believe guns kill people. In my opinion, technology is like a gun. It is a tool that assists someone in doing something less than savory. In this case, because we are so dependent on our technology, it causes a loss in courage like I already discussed. Let me elaborate on the technology end a little even though I've already touched on it.
- In 1900, telephones were scarce. It had been invented almost 30 years earlier, but phone lines didn't stretch the continent like they do now. They were becoming more prominent in major cities, but communication was still dependent on face to face and letter carriers.
- In 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made the first trans-continental phone call from New York to San Fransisco.
- In 1942, the first electronic digital computer was built by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry
- In 1947, AT&T developed the North American Numbering Plan that assigned phone numbers to individuals. Meaning that was the birth of the 10-digit phone number.
- Also in 1947, the first mobile phones were invented though not sold commercially.
- In 1956, the first computer hard disk was used.
- In 1958, the computer modem was invented. That same year saw the invention of the integrated circuit.
- In 1959, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce both invented the microchip.
- In 1962, Spacewar became the first computer video game invented.
- 1968 saw the invention of the first computer mouse by Douglas Engelbart, the first computer with integrated circuits, and random access memory (RAM) by Robert Dennard.
- In 1969, we saw the beginnings of the massive outlet that is the Internet in arpanet.
- In the 70's, we were given the floppy disk by Alan Shugart, the word processor, Pong the video game, the Ethernet cable by Robert Metcalfe and Xerox, cell phones and the cray supercomputer by Seymour Cray.
- Here's the list of advances in the 80's: MS-DOS and the IBM-PC were '81, The Apple Lisa in '83, the CD-ROM and the Apple Macintosh in '84, Windows by Microsoft in '85, and digital cell phones in '88.
- And finally, the '90's and 2000's: the World Wide Web, Internet protocol (HTTP), and WWW language (HTML) were created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990; the first text message was sent in '92; the Pentium processor was invented in '93; the Java computer language and DVD were invented in '95. ; Web TV was '96; 2001 saw the creation of the iPod; Phone tooth by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau came in 2002; Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg and Intel Express Chips were 2004; YouTube by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim came into being in 2005;
It is part of the human experience to experience what technology doesn't allow us to. What's the point of living a life where there is no confrontation or no reason to risk everything? That's what these social media and texting outlets are leading us too. In a world where we don't have to face someone and TALK to them, who would choose to do exactly that? It's much safer to hide behind a phone or a website. There is no chance of letting someone see the damage they've done that way. I, myself, am more inclined to say what I feel behind the safety of a phone or website. Realizing what I have in writing this and doing my research for it, that's not all I want to do anymore. There's a strange exhilaration in communicating the way we were meant too. I dare you too try it. Put aside your phone and your facebook and tell someone something important. It doesn't matter what the outcome is. The fact that you have courage enough to attempt it is all you're looking for. That way, the next time you need to talk to someone, you won't be afraid.
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