The Instagram message from my birth mother came in at 10:45 a.m. eastern time, meaning it was 10:45 p.m. where she lived.
It was jumbled, and she’d clearly hit “send” before she had written everything she wanted to say. But it was obvious she was struggling.
“I hope ur dad is happy,” she wrote, referring to my adoptive father. He and my adoptive mother — whom I refer to simply as my parents, or “mom” and “dad” — had raised me since I was a few days old.
“I’ve never heard from him, but birthmothers are always in the shadows … Many people treated me like trash, and I’m not. It’s a shame I never heard from your adoptive family. I hope your dad reads this, too, and alsk (sic) realizes I’m not trash. I hope you pass it on.”
It had been almost 30 years since my birth mother, then a 20-year-old sophomore in college, had given me up for adoption. Yet here I was at work on a Friday morning, staring at a message that read “like someone washed down Xanax with a bottle of wine,” my now-fiancé said at the time.
Most of my birth mother’s message wasn’t true, and she knew it as much as I did. But despite my shock and confusion – the last time I’d heard from her directly was four months before, when she wished me a happy 27th birthday – I didn’t, and still don’t, blame her for it. She was hurting.
Like many things in life, adoptions are messy. As Cynthia Landesberg wrote in her Washington Post piece headlined: “As an adoptee, I know: Adoption is not a fairy-tale answer to abortion,” everyone wants the Hallmark movie-version of adoption.
But the reality is, birth parents often deal with long-term psychological consequences from giving up a child. This includes unresolved grief, isolation and difficulty with future relationships, studies show. Some even suffer from PTSD.
A 2013 study in the American Academy of Pediatrics also found that “the odds of a reported suicide attempt are ~4 times greater in adoptees compared with non-adoptees.”
“There is a mental health crisis among adopted people,” a woman who was adopted told USA Today this spring.
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In the days since Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and ending 50 years of federal abortion rights, I’ve seen acquaintances post on social media about adoption resources in various states and read other posts about how adoption is a solution to abortion.
While I believe many wonderful things can and do come from adoption, I also must emphasize: Adoption isn’t the “easy” alternative for someone who finds themselves unable or unwilling to have a child.
Not for the birth parents, not for the child and not for the adoptive parents.
The pregnancy
My birth parents met in Boston their freshman year of college and fell in lust. That’s where I was born in February 1994.
My birth mother came from a small, conservative city in Wisconsin where she was raised Roman Catholic. She told me years ago that she remembers seeing anti-abortion billboards in town when she was growing up.
When she found out she was pregnant in May 1993 — she was home from school at the time – she knew she couldn’t keep me. Her family told her the same.
My birth father, who grew up in Rhode Island, agreed. It took him years, until I was somewhere between 4 and 8 years old (the age varies depending on who you speak to), for him to tell his family he had a child. Before I was born, he told a social worker at the adoption agency he’d “keep the pregnancy and child a secret from his family ‘probably forever.’”
Initially, my birth father wanted my birth mother to have an abortion, according to a letter the social worker wrote to my parents detailing my birth parents’ backgrounds. But my birth mother, the social worker wrote, said “abortion was not an option for her as it is in complete conflict with her moral and religious values.” (Despite this, she believes a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body.)
Thus, the social worker wrote, she and my birth father were “determined to explore adoption as an option.” They wanted to finish school and didn’t have the resources or desire to have a child. They hoped to one day get married — perhaps to one another, they thought at one point — own a home and have established careers before becoming parents. They didn’t feel they’d be able to “provide an adequate and stable home for a child.”
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They began working with this particular social worker in September 1993. A month later, about four months before I was born, they broke up.
By the time I was born, my birth mother did not want my birth father at the hospital. She later allowed him to visit before I was given to my parents.
Unable to have children
My parents were “older” when they began dating (at least back then it was considered “older”), both in their early-to-mid-30s. Originally from different areas of upstate New York, they had separately made their way to the Boston area several years before they met. They married in April 1985.
I don’t know exactly when they began trying to have children, but my mom had reproductive health issues that made it difficult. Then in 1990, she faced her first of three bouts with cancer: ovarian. While the cancer wasn’t the cause of her inability to get pregnant, within a few years, she and my dad began exploring adoption as an option.
Their first experience was heartbreaking. A young mother whom the adoption agency had been working with was set to give up her baby. My parents visited the child and the birth mother at the hospital after he was born, and they fell in love. Then, as is a birth mother’s right in some states for a certain period of time after a child’s birth, she changed her mind. They were devastated.
When the adoption agency contacted them in late fall 1993, they were hopeful but guarded. They were told that though my birth parents were no longer together at that time, the two had separately picked my parents as their first choice after being given the biographies of “numerous” prospective adoptive parents. According to the social worker, even my birth parents were surprised when they were told they’d chosen the same couple.
Though my parents and birth parents agreed it would be a closed adoption — meaning there would be no contact between my parents and my birth parents after I was born, and legally my birth parents could not contact me until I turned 18 — my birth mother requested that my parents write an annual letter and send photos of me to the adoption agency, which would then pass the documents on to her.
My birth father did “not wish to receive pictures or letters on a yearly basis,” the social worker wrote, but asked that he be sent a photo of me when I turned 17. He was open to meeting my parents before my birth, however.
My parents never ended up meeting with my birth father, but they did send the requested letter and photos to the adoption agency yearly. Later, when I was a preteen and began asking about my birth parents, they provided me with the information I asked for.
And several years after that, they agreed to facilitate contact with my birth parents. When I was 14, my parents and I met my birth father. Two years after that, at age 16, my mom and I met my birth mother.
Cue the bizarre, Friday morning Instagram message from my birth mother.
The aftermath
I waited about eight hours before replying to her.
I probably didn’t have to, but this was someone who was clearly hurting and deserved a reply. I probably would have been justified if her message angered me, but it didn’t. I probably could have told her to not contact me again if this was going to be the kind of message she sent, but I did not.
“It sounds like you’re going through a lot right now and I’m sorry about that for you,” I began. “I know it was a very difficult decision and you were told you had no other choice.”
Then I continued: “As for not hearing from my parents, you and I both know that’s not true.”
My parents had never hidden the adoption from me. Long before I understood what it meant, even before I could form full sentences, they read picture books about adoption and adopted kids. I remember the pages well, filled with drawings of children with different colored skin and hair.
As I grew up, my parents tried to help me understand what adoption was. I am still shocked when I hear stories about people finding out they’re adopted through the now-popular DNA tests or by going through their parents’ belongings, because that was never my family.
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Though I am not a parent myself, nor have I ever been pregnant, I have to imagine it would have been incredibly difficult for my parents to allow me to contact, and then meet, my birth parents — especially as I was a volatile teenager at the time. And had I been in their shoes, I don’t know if I even would have been willing to send a letter and photos annually.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my mom was terrified of what it would mean to meet my birth mother. Because of certain circumstances — my birth mother had married and had a young child at the time, but she had not (and still has not to this day) told that family about me — we had to travel to meet her. The flights weren’t cheap, so my mom and I went alone.
I messaged this to my birth mother, reminding her that my parents never had to agree to anything prior to my 18th birthday. My dad was the one who was always there reassuring my mom that allowing me to meet my birth mother was the right thing to do, I wrote.
“If he thought you were trash, he never would have been so supportive,” I said. “Neither of them would have been.”
Then I acknowledged her decades of pain.
She had told me years prior, when we had more of a relationship — now we only exchange Instagram messages a few times a year — that giving me up was one of the most difficult things she had ever done, and I don’t doubt it. I cannot begin to imagine what she has been through or the vile reactions she received when she told people she had given a child up for adoption. (That was a key reason why she never told her husband and kids about me.)
But she also needed to know how this had affected me, too.
I am blessed to have been raised by my parents. Before she died of breast cancer in 2015, my mom was my rock. She and I fought frequently when I was a teen as many mothers and daughters do, but leaving for a college 1,000 miles away when I was 18 helped mend our relationship tremendously. I was just getting to know her as an adult when she died weeks before my 21st birthday. I have so much to thank her for.
My dad is a gem. He and I always had a good relationship growing up, though he worked too much. In the seven-plus years since my mom’s death, we’ve only grown closer. Though I’ve probably called him one too many times crying late at night over something not worth waking him up over, I’m his one and only child, after all!
Despite my upbringing and my gentle, kindhearted and genuinely good parents, I spent years in therapy working through the ramifications of the adoption.
It is one thing to understand logically why your birth parents gave you up, and to look at the life and opportunities you’ve had and know it wouldn’t be possible if your birth parents had kept you. It’s another thing to feel like the two people who are inherently supposed to protect and care for you didn’t want you. Logic and emotion are often in conflict with one another — especially as a young teenager. Anyone can tell you that.
“I will never be able to understand your experience but you will also never be able to understand mine,” I wrote back to my birth mother. “I hope you find peace one day, and I really am sorry that you’re having a particularly hard time. I’m open to talking more about this if you’d like, or not if you don’t want to. I hope your family and kids are doing well.”
She apologized profusely the next day. She had been in COVID-19 quarantine after a flight home and drank a little too much, she said.
“You were raised exactly how I wanted you to be raised,” she added.
We haven’t spoken about the message since.
I could spend days writing about my experience as an adoptee, and that’s without speaking to my birth parents or their family members (some of whom I’m in contact with) or my dad or other members of our family who have known me from birth to get their perspectives.
But I’ll leave with this: Adoption isn’t the solution to abortion that many people want it to be, and that many hide behind. And its ramifications, both good and bad, last a lifetime.
Isabel Hughes covers breaking news and public safety for DelawareOnline.com and The News Journal.
Got a story tip or idea? Send to Isabel Hughes at ihughes@delawareonline.com. For all things breaking news, follow her on Twitter at @izzihughes_
