The Weight of Guilt and Love

Point B:

I consider myself a caring person so I’m grateful to be able to feel and show my emotions. For many reasons, not all people are like this. The emotions we carry inside of us are very powerful feelings. Our feelings are based a lot on the experiences of our lives. So all of us have both good and painful feelings within us. The biggest feeling that I still struggle with today surrounding your adoption is GUILT. I have talked to you about this many times and I can’t express my gratitude for your understanding. However no matter how much I read, talk, or write about it the guilt feeling doesn’t go away.

As I sit here and write this, I am searching my mind on how to accurately describe my thoughts. When I discuss our story to people, some common reactions are that “it was a different era then” or “you did the best you could at the time” or “you were not given a choice.” There is a part of me that agrees with all of these. Actually I wish I could say that any one of those feel 100% true. But I can’t. When all is said and done, isn’t SOMEONE responsible for my signature on that paper?

If it wasn’t me, who was it? Was it my mom, the adoption agency, the doctor, the hospital, society, my family, or your birthdad? No, NONE of them had that power. And unfortunately as someone once said to a group of birthmoms I was in, “no one was holding a gun to our heads.”

So in the courtroom of adoption even without a formal verdict, I have always felt GUILTY.

Point A:

My mom read me 1 Kings 3:16-27 as a young girl. Many adoptive parents in my era were told to raise us thinking adoption was an act of love.

During my youth I never held malice for you. It was not even a glimmer in my thoughts. I knew you were young and never in my wildest dreams thought you could have kept me.

As I grew and became a young adult, I met my husband. When he joined the military at 18, I knew I wanted to be with him as soon as I graduated. Six months after my high school graduation, my parents were helping us pack our car and saying goodbye as we set out for the base 2000 miles away. My mom talks about how my dad went behind the garage and just sobbed! It was at that moment they truly understood how much love it takes to let someone go.

I never appreciated both your sacrifices until I stood sobbing in the airport as my 16-year-old daughter boarded a plane to Germany. She was off to discover new worlds as a foreign exchange student. It was at that moment for the first time that I felt sincere sadness for you.

As with many things from the 1970’s, verbiage has changed. We have come to know that maybe this mindset was not the best way to raise an adopted child. It is rather cliché now, but I would not want to have been told any different. Accepting my adoption as an act of love made our reunion less difficult because I didn’t hold bitterness for you.

I only had love!

Image Descriptions:

1. Pink coneflower close-up — A vibrant pink coneflower in bloom, with the quote overlayed: “Sometimes you just have to let them go for them to know how very much you love them. 1 Kings 3:16-27.”

2. Judge’s gavel — A gavel resting on a wooden block against a dark background, with the text: “Will I always feel guilty? – A Birthmom.”