{"id":23856,"date":"2017-02-10T12:37:11","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T12:37:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adoption-2020.local\/birth-mother-regrets-learning-to-let-go\/"},"modified":"2021-03-10T16:48:29","modified_gmt":"2021-03-11T00:48:29","slug":"birth-mother-regrets-learning-to-let-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/birth-mother-regrets-learning-to-let-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Birth Mother Regrets: Learning to Let Go"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say the pain will go away. But this birth mother regrets her choice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf they offered to give Cricket back, would you want him?\u201d<\/p>\n

My mother asks me this every so often. She asked again after my last Skype call with Cricket\u2014I think it had been a year since she last asked\u2014a new record.<\/p>\n

In the past, I have always started my answer with a rambling paragraph about how it doesn\u2019t work that way. They would never \u201cgive him back\u201d and we have no legal claim on him. Even if they lost custody of him he would not come to us\u2014that kind of thing. It\u2019s all true, and it hurts to have to say it. It\u2019s not a purifying pain. I\u2019m not going to get through the explanation of TPR (Termination of Parental Rights) and my total legal worthlessness to Cricket and then feel lighter. It is a mucky, sandpaper-like pain that I am sure that I deserve, but that doesn\u2019t heal or clean or clarify anything. My mother does, I\u2019m sure, understand by now that I cannot get him back. As soon as I signed TPR, I lost any legal claim on my son. We have been over this and over this and over this<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Accept the adoption placement as really permanent<\/h2>\n

What bothers me more than feeling obligated to slog through \u2018How Adoption Works\u2019 for the nth time is my mother\u2019s refusal to accept the placement<\/a> as really permanent. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I miss Cricket and I grieve the loss of him and I have birth mother regrets about my decision. But Ruth and Nora are his parents, they will always<\/span> be his parents, and I don\u2019t think fantasizing about them leaving an enormous Moses basket on my doorstep would be good for our relationship or my own mental health.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that when he was still very small, before my son Joey was conceived, I would sometimes lie awake in bed at night, imagining that baby Cricket was asleep in the bed between Mister Book and me. It didn\u2019t make me feel better, but I couldn\u2019t help it sometimes. I haven\u2019t imagined something like that in years, and I think that\u2019s a good sign for me\u2014having a question jerk me back to that kind of expression of grief isn\u2019t healthy for me. And it certainly doesn\u2019t do Cricket any good.<\/p>\n

It does make me sad, though. Cricket is in kindergarten now. Every day I have missed more of his life. A question like that isn\u2019t the only thing that can pull me into sadness about the adoption. Milestones tend to trigger it, and sometimes there\u2019s no clear antecedent. I\u2019m just sad not to be parenting my oldest son.<\/p>\n

This time, I chose to ignore the opportunity for adoption education with my mother.<\/p>\n

This time, I just said \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

by: Susie Books<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They say the pain will go away. But this birth mother regrets her choice. \u201cIf they offered to give Cricket back, would you want him?\u201d My mother asks me this every so often. She asked again after my last Skype call with Cricket\u2014I think it had been a year since she last asked\u2014a new record.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10914,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[649],"tags":[701,646,707,635,706,679,705,671,700,697,699,703,704,702,696,695,698],"class_list":["post-23856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birth-mothers","tag-abortion","tag-adoption","tag-advice","tag-birth-mother","tag-birth-mother-advice","tag-birthmom","tag-birthmom-advice","tag-birthmother","tag-choice","tag-give-up","tag-give-up-baby","tag-let-go","tag-letting-go","tag-parenting","tag-place-for-adoption","tag-placement","tag-put-up"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10914"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adoptionnetwork.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}