Dear First Mom/Birth Mom/Mother of Loss/Burning Heart of Love, I Have Something I Want to Tell You

I’ve been thinking about this subject since talking to a friend this morning about how she felt about giving up her baby over thirty years ago. I weeded. I dug a pile of rocks out from under mulched leaves and rotting apples. I listened to the bees up above me in the apple tree, the birds singing, the bleating of the neighbor’s two goats. 

After a while, I put in my ear buds and listened to Taylor Swift’s album 1989 because my 23-year-old daughter loves it, and I wanted to listen to what is playing in my daughter’s brain. I listened to Are We Out of the Woods Again once, twice, so many times, just over and over. Are we out of the woods yet are we out of the woods yet are we in the clear yet are we in the clear yet?

I started dancing in the apple orchard. There was no one around, but I didn’t care if anyone saw me. I felt purely happy and I had to move.

Something had split open in me. 

The mistake was in taking the stories personally. The mistake was thinking that my birth mom, my first mom, my burning heart of love, had a voice that was rational and true. The mistake was thinking that the voice in my head was rational and true.

There was another voice. Other voices.

Guilt and shame are a choice. If I want to, if I really, really, really want to, I can be happy.

And this, too, I believe, is true for my friend. 

Shame is not part of who we are. It’s a hammer we carry and beat ourselves with. And we can, I believe, stop. 

If my friend wants, if she really really wants to be free, she can drop the shame of relinquishment. She can realize she does not make the world a better place by feeling lousy about herself and her actions. She can start over right now.  

She can love herself as much as I do. Even more. 

As can I. 

A few months ago, Pam Cordano and I decided to revamp our adoptee retreats to include first moms. While some people were excited about this idea, in general we learned that adoptees didn’t want this! They were too angry, too hurt, too afraid. It wasn’t even going to be adoptees paired with their own first moms. It was going to be five adoptees, five first moms, nonrelated. We cancelled the event.

It wasn’t something we would have suggested a few years ago. Back then I still called my birth mom the bitch from New Jersey. I thought she was the bad guy. Cruel. Stupid. I could not understand why she would not want to meet me. Why she would lie and say I had the wrong person when I tracked her down. 

I thought she was some kind of monster. 

And then I started meeting women who had either chosen to give up their babies or had been forced to relinquish their babies often without even the chance to hold their child and say hello, goodbye.

I thought adoptees were busted, but, holy cow, I think first mothers have it even worse. It’s one thing to be given away, and it’s another thing to carry the weight of the knowledge that you did the giving (even if you were forced). I never felt guilty for being relinquished. I felt shame. Guilt is for people who feel they did something wrong. Shame is for people who think they are wrong. First moms, as far as I can see, often live in the double dose of guilt and shame.  

Ouch.

A human body was not created to have a baby and then to not care for it. A woman’s body is a mother-machine. For heaven’s sake, it makes milk! Women’s bodies are flooded with chemicals that tell the mother: love this being, keep it alive, stay, put its needs before your own. Take the baby away from all these reactions and you have a recipe for disaster. You have a shit show. 

(There are times a when woman chooses 100% to not keep a baby because 100% she does not want to be a mother. I have never talked to a woman who felt this way, but I 100% believe that we own our bodies, and if my body makes a baby I do not want, I love that we have adoption to help get the child to a mother who does want it. This essay is not about these situations because otherwise this thing would go on forever and not be accurate because I’d have no idea what I was talking about since I know so little about this kind of circumstance.)

Maybe guilt and shame are also hardwired into women’s brains to keep them from having babies and then walking away from them as soon as it becomes clear motherhood is not going to be an easy undertaking. However. What if the guilt and shame first mothers feel is part of an energetic field that goes out into the world, into the bodies and minds of the children they lost, and what if then their child that perhaps they never even saw now carries their mother’s guilt and shame as a shared burden? 

What if part of my brain is distracted by the cries my soul can hear my first mother’s soul making even now, even after she has died? 

What if an adoptee hating her birth/first mother is the same as hating herself? What if the stories we have in our heads are killing us? What if the truth is that a body making a body is an act of life, and to believe that life equals love is not an unreasonable leap to make. So what if we drop the stories and let ourselves, if just for the sake of our adrenals, bathe in love?

Don’t try to take away my feelings, too, perhaps you argue, and you would be right. We have already lost so much. I’m not trying to take anything away from you other than the crazy glasses you are wearing that tell you that the universe is not madly in love with you.

Just as I feel it would have been easier to have been happy if my mom who raised me had invested more resources in her own happiness, I also suspect the same is true for my first mom. What if, as women who birthed children, whether we were able to raise them or not, our job is to be rooted in the deep gratitude for life and to live our thank yous every day instead of putting our heads in buckets of shame shit because that’s where, we believe, we belong? 

What is the point of staying in shame? In self-hatred? If it is to ensure the same mistake is not made by future generations, why not go ballistic on the world and let it know what a terrible idea mother-child separation is? 

But listen—what if this is done with a fierce and toothsome joy, because, I’m sorry, you’re still alive, and yes, if you have decided life is dark and awful and not worth, well, living, then that of course that is fully your choice to make. But what if the spirits of your children, alive or dead, are affected by this darkness of yours? What if you are bringing them down even when you don’t know each other’s faces?

I ate a pint of Ben and Jerry’s The Tonight Dough before sitting down to write this because I was so hungry. I was not going to be able to say what I wanted to, but I was going to do my best. I so much want first moms to not live in cutting self-neglect and self-disregard and self-hatred. I want them to love themselves even more for having had to endure and survive losing a huge piece of themselves. Not even a piece. A child isn’t a piece of you. A child is magical, miraculous, and if she or he came from your womb, that means you were the home for this magic, this miracle and then, suddenly, you weren’t.

What I want to say is, It’s okay. What I want to say is, I need you to love yourself wholeheartedly so I can feel free to love myself wholeheartedly.  

What I want to say is, We are in this together.

More than anything, I want the shame and self-hatred that seems to go hand-in-hand for both mothers and children of loss to dissolve into something less crippling, less life-destroying, less final. Yes, we lost. Yes, it hurt. Yes, it’s painful, so so painful. 

We use words as if they are a good idea. As if they are going to help us. But what if when we talk about mothers and children and separation, words actually compound the staggeringly misunderstood shock and grief that surrounds the tearing apart that which was not meant to be torn asunder?  

People are recognized by the language they speak (for the sake of this argument, let’s use the languages of people’s home countries and just focus on that). I speak English: I am an American. You speak Japanese: You are Japanese. What language do mothers of loss speak? What language do adoptees speak? We need a language. We need to name ourselves. First mother, birth mother, mother of loss. First mother implies there is another, and in the heart of most first mothers I’m guessing is the belief they are the only mother. Birth mother sounds sort of like lunch lady, like they are a duty performed. Mother of loss is so single-mindedly sad. You gave birth to life. None of those are right. Adoptee. What the hell does that even mean? I didn’t adopt anything. Actually, that’s not true, and that’s part of the problem, and something too big to address now, here. 

I want to light something on fire to symbolize what I am. Maybe that’s why setting fires is a thing for so many adoptees. 

I wonder what birth, first, mothers of loss want to do to symbolize what they experienced, are experiencing. Maybe they could take an ax and hack a big branch off a tree and then strap the tree to their back and walk around with it when they want. 

I want you to be okay, sweet friend of mine. I want to watch you burn with love. I want you to drop the story that because you did something horrible, you are horrible. Something horrible happened. And now, what if you live the rest of your life doing one wonderful thing after another? What if adoptees and first moms kneel at the alter of adoration for each other and burn things out of love and solidarity?

We are not alone.  

We burn in love. 

And if love is not yet available to you, what about curiosity?

I love you. I want you to feel peace. You are not my first mother, but you were someone’s, and if you were mine, I would want you to be okay. I would want you to be happy. To feel joy. To remember me with deep love and cry, if you needed to, because you loved and missed me, not because you hated yourself. 

I am so curious about you, your life, your stories, your feelings.

Tell me everything. I’m listening.

I have learned so much about the importance and impact of meaning in our lives from my friend Pam Cordano, author of Ten Foundations for a Meaningful Life (No Matter What’s Happened). I was stuck in my head for years and years with story, with repeating thoughts, with emotions that were not serving me. Writing about my feelings, about what was happening, about what life was like as an adoptee brought me community. It brought meaning to my life. I wasn’t alone any more with my experience.

In chapter one, Pam talks about the importance of call and response. The baby calls to the mother, and the mother responds, and we learn that we are safe. When this call and response cycle is broken, mayhem occurs. Attachment disorder happens. And on and on. But here’s the thing: we can change. We can grow. I call to Pam, and she answers. (Read her book for a better understanding of this important concept.) My nervous system is learning this new, safe world.

Grief and shame can eat away at our self until we get sick and die.

Or we can face our feelings, share them, and grow.

xoxo