Open Adoption and What Every Mother Knows About Letting Go.
- Sarah Poet
- Jul 21
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 6
The first thing almost anyone will say to you when you tell them that you've placed a child for adoption is to tell you how selfless you are for doing it.
This has always resulted in a sense of internal confusion for me, a birth mother. Resulting likely from holding a complexity that is just way too big for that one moment meanwhile someone else feels like they're paying you a compliment, by summing it up just telling you how selfless you are. It's always said like it's the ultimate compliment, actually.
But it never resonates with me.
It's always felt weird, like someone trying to put the wrong words in your mouth, but you don't know the right ones, so you just don't say anything at all and you go on holding the complexity of the experience only you know.
