About a month after I placed my daughter for adoption, I started noticing something.
People stopped checking in as much.
It wasn’t like everybody disappeared on the same day. There wasn’t some moment when everyone decided, Okay, the adoption is over. She’s fine now.
Life just moved on.
The problem was, I hadn’t moved on from being a birth mother. I was still trying to figure out what that meant and how I was supposed to live with everything that came with it.
I did look for support over the years. There just wasn’t much out there. At least, I couldn’t find what I actually needed.
But I had my parents.
They were there when I was pregnant. They were there when I made the decision. They were there after I placed her. They knew the story because they had lived through it with me.
I didn’t have to explain why a birthday might bother me or why something completely random could bring everything back up. I didn’t have to give them twenty years of background before I could talk about what I was feeling that day.
So even though I think I knew I needed more support, I didn’t really do anything about it.
I had them.
And then four years ago, they died.
Eight days apart.
Suddenly, the two people who had been there through all of it weren’t here anymore.
There are people in my life now who love me and care about me, but they weren’t there for that part of my life. They didn’t watch it happen. They don’t have those memories with me.
That’s different.
Sometimes something happens now that brings the adoption back up, and explaining why it affects me would mean explaining everything that came before it too.
There are times you don’t want to do all of that.
You just want somebody to understand.
And I think that’s when I really started seeing the hole that had been there all along.
Support shouldn’t end when the adoption does
I think we put a lot of focus on supporting a birth mother while she’s pregnant and immediately after placement.
Of course she needs support then.
But what about six months later?
What about five years later?
What about twenty years later?
Because being a birth mother doesn’t expire.
My daughter grew up. I grew up too. My life changed. Her life changed. Our relationship changed. I’ve had other children. I’ve lost people. I’ve watched milestones happen. I’ve had things hit me that I expected to hurt and completely random things hit me that I never saw coming.
I haven’t needed the same kind of support through every one of those seasons.
But that doesn’t mean I never needed any.
That’s the part I think we’re missing.
Long-term support doesn’t mean assuming a birth mother spends the rest of her life falling apart over the adoption.
It means recognizing that something this big can show up differently at different points in her life.
Sometimes she might need to talk.
Sometimes she might need practical advice because she’s dealing with something she has never dealt with before.
Sometimes she might want to hear from another birth mother just so she can say, Does this happen to you too?
And sometimes she may not need anything at all.
But it matters that something is there when she does.
I wish I had had all of it
When I think about what I would have wanted all those years, I can’t narrow it down to one thing.
I would have wanted someone who understood without me having to explain everything.
I would have wanted somewhere I could go when adoption suddenly came back up again.
I would have wanted practical guidance when I didn’t know what to do with something.
And I would have wanted other birth mothers I could talk to who actually understood some of this because they had lived it too.
Basically, I would have wanted the things I kept looking for and couldn’t find.
That’s a big part of why Birth Mother Network exists now.
Because the support a birth mother needs a month after placement may not be the support she needs ten or twenty years later.
But she shouldn’t have to wait until the people who once understood are gone to realize there was never anything else there to catch her.
No birth mother should have to navigate that lifetime alone.