Open Adoption and What Every Mother Knows About Letting Go.

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.

I have never once patted myself on the back for being selfless about placing my daughter for adoption.

Actually, as I think back to that time, I notice that I felt pretty dang selfish. I selfishly wanted her, actually. I didn't want to be "selfless" and let her go. I wanted her more than anything.

There's only one reason why a truly loving mother lets go. And it's because she has to.

The first three days.

I had chosen her parents while I was pregnant. I birthed her in a hospital and I safeguarded about thirty-six hours for she and I and didn't permit them to come until the third day.

I didn't sleep at all. I held and studied her. I didn't breastfeed her because it went against the recommendations of everyone who wanted the adoption to happen. There would have been too much bonding. At night, while my little twelve year old sister slept curled on the recliner, refusing to leave us, I whispered all the truths and all the love in her little ears.

I knew her. I knew everything about her. I gave her the name Anna Faith and inside that little window of time, that was her name. Faith because I had made a deal with something I didn't even know I believed in until she was growing inside of me and I was faced with sending her into the big wide world without me. The deal was that if I had to let her go, that she would always be safe. That she would be protected throughout all of her days with a love even bigger than mine.

So far, the deal has stuck. Her life has been so good that it gives me incredible peace and gratitude.

On the third day after her birth, they came. Her beautiful new parents. The only ones I would have chosen. Open Adoption means that you know and have a relationship between the birth and adoptive families. In a homemade maternity dress my grandmother had made from a JoAnn's fabric pattern, on that July day, I handed my nine pound three ounce bundle to her new mother Eileen.

Even though it was twenty-five years ago this week, I've never forgotten the visceral feeling of her leaving my arms. When my mother wanted a picture, Eileen offered to hand her back and I shook my head no. I don't know if I said anything or explained myself or gave the wrong impression. I just couldn't possibly hand my child over a second time.

An initiation into grief.

I cried for days, ripped and torn, in the bed at the bottom of the basement stairs that had become my "bedroom" when I'd come home pregnant from college. Since there was no door on this space, my family heard my suffering.

I suppose when my mother couldn't take it anymore, she declared that we were going to our Delaware beach home. So with ice packs on my painful and engorged breasts from all that milk that didn't go to my child and sitting on a doughnut, she transferred my process to a room in a small house that at least had a door on it.

It was an enormous amount of grief. One time, when my son was later diagnosed with RSV and we were in the hospital when he was three weeks old and I was sitting there breastfeeding that baby in the middle of the night, alone, I heard the wails of a mother and knew her child had died. I wept with her.

I grieved in that bedroom as a nineteen year old because there wasn't another option. I knew everyone around me was uncomfortable. And I can tell you that I also felt the message that it was about time that I started to get it together.

I suppose that was what I tried to do. When we're young, to emulate the models we are given is natural. And my family and especially my mother had no model for grief other than to go out and succeed. So grief, I realize, became paired with trying to control the grief, contain the grief, and become something more than the grief.

Some people reach for a substance. Some people overachieve. My drug was overachieving. But I never felt like I was succeeding at a damn thing. It's followed me throughout my life, this fear that I won't be able to provide for my children, that I am not worthy of their greatness, that I'm just the thing that brings them through but not the thing worthy of much else, including anyone to help me with the children. I'm just being honest. It's one of the things I revisit every July 22 anniversary and assess how I'm doing, what progress I've truly made. This year, particularly, has an interesting flair. An invitation, perhaps, to finally knock that shit off.

I started back at college three weeks after my daughter was born. And I can tell you that every decision, every action, every attempt to make something of myself after that for the next nine years became about getting back to the place where I just might - this time - be worthy of keeping my own baby.

Nine years later.

It was less than three months after my daughter was born that I felt I was falling in love with one of my best friends.

I'd lost my baby, and he'd lost his mother when she'd left him as a teen, and we were too young to see or know that what we felt was not exactly the stuff of real love.

By the time I was twenty and he was turning twenty-one, I was already thoroughly annoyed with him. I was hell-bent on the path to being a mother and he wouldn't stop drinking or get his act together. I worked and worked to get him and us into shape.

The shape of a family, of course. I would make it yet. Come to think of it, if I'd taken all that energy I put into him and had put it into me, life would have been very different.

He never stopped drinking. He never started acting like he'd be a good father. He never even showed one hint of wanting to take care of me or a family.

But what did I do? I held on. I was trying to make something of my life, damn it, and for some reason under the sun, I had decided it would be with him.

I was torn and trying to leave when my son was conceived. I remember that day, maybe as the sperm hit the egg, I burst into uncontrollable tears. Whatever that means.

The life I made happen.

I have this memory of swaying in the living room of the bungalow we lived in close to UNCA Asheville with my new son in his baby sling, close to my body. Something horrible had just occurred. He was maybe two months old, and I had a feeling of "oh fuck" in my gut in relation to his father, but I slow danced and swayed with my babe to Ray LaMontagne with a certain vow to cover this child.

Maybe, like my mother before me, I had already overlooked what I shouldn't have overlooked in order to call a thing a family, a success. But it was not a success, and now I was afraid. And I was afraid, but pretending that I wasn't afraid.

And my son was here, and I decided unconsciously, early, that if I just kept loving this child, just kept holding him close to my heart, it would be okay.

I would carry us through. I'd gotten us this far, didn't I?

Besides, we had the house (even though it was a rental), and the organic cloth diapers, and the organic baby mattress, and I ate organic food for him to safely breastfeed, and I had saved up enough to take a few months off and have a little maternity leave. And, and, and...

I was doing it. We were doing it. And I had the one thing I had ever wanted. My son.

He was never a substitute for his sister. Thank God I wasn't that deranged. He was himself. He was glorious. He was my sun.

And I didn't try to shape him like I'd tried to shape his father. A child educator, I was only ever interested in Rowan becoming Rowan.

What I was doing, however, was trying to prevent him from becoming his father. With all of the energy that I'd used to bring him here, now I was using it to try to protect him from something, for him to make it through up to his potential.

Putting my body between him and the world. Making sure the right doors opened. Compensating for what wasn't happening at home by trying to find other avenues and role models. Doing by myself the work of two thoughtful parents at times. Eventually leaving his father, always with the silent, even unconscious (eventually conscious) prayer that he not become his father.

Identity formation.

Last year, my sixteen year old wanted to change his last name to his father's grandmother's last name. I trust his soul. I listened. I saw him making this step away from his father.

And you betcha I supported it. I got permission from his dad, and then for his sixteenth birthday, I was going to help my son change his name. We were going through the process when his father apparently forgot that he'd given permission and revoked it again.

My son was mad at me and said it was my fault that I didn't go through with it.

I can't, right now, explain what it's like to be the consistent parent who then becomes the targeted parent. To be the parent who wanted the child more than anything in the world, who values the child more than anyone in the world, for someone else to convince the child against his mother. It's still too close to home, too fresh. The fuckery I'm still inside of.

Time's up.

I was served custody papers last week. My son is sixteen and a half.

Probably since he was twelve, I'd been doing this countdown thing. He'd have a birthday and I'd go, "Okay, I only have six years left." Five years left... four years left...

And then we were at two years left. And in May he said he qualified for early graduation and I thought, "But I had two years left!" That would only mean I'd have one year left! I cried right there in front of him when this realization struck, which I later addressed and said - look, it's okay that I had an emotional reaction, but what would not be okay is if I held you back because of my emotional reaction. He seemed to get that.

The strange and generous thing is that this "this many years left" habit of mine had actually begun to relax over the last six months or so. Like the wound underneath it had actually begun to really heal. A generous foreshadowing.

And what was that wound, exactly? Well, tough to pinpoint. Something about not being able to raise my first child, working like hell to shape a life to the point where I could have him, then making a life with him, and trying to play-dough sculpt that life into a thing that I could look at and call it successful.

The only thing that I ever actually felt successful at was the way I love my son Rowan.

There was just no question. He was tops. I'm the president of the fan club. I'm all in.

And then, all of a sudden, he's not. In.

He's hiding out at his father's house, refusing to come home. He's not responding to my attempts to talk.

He's acting like his father. And his father is teaching him to act like his father.

He started punching holes in the doors two years ago, and come to think of it, his father had punched holes in the walls in our early twenties.

And as I unwind the story, and go back through time, I realize the point in time where I'd begun trying to hold it all together. To shape it. The point where I'd chosen this man out of grief and desperation. The point where I didn't know how to feel the magnitude of the loss of my baby and so I dealt with it by trying to construct something of my life.

And I feel the tendrils of how those early habits have also remained woven throughout my life. I feel the effects of being ever-present and so available to a being because I wanted to be, but it had become more depleting than I'd realized.

My son punched a tree and broke his hand last month. He was mad at his father when he did it. And I thought to myself in the week afterward, "He's busting us out of patterns." Boy is he ever.

It ends with us.

Last August 2024, my son and I went to see the movie It Ends With Us. It's about domestic violence. And I went into the movie thinking that the point was going to be that this couple identifies and heals their violence, and in fact, spoiler alert, the "Us" that it's referring to is the mother and child.

Yes, I cried. I also watched Maid with him years ago and he got it. He gets it. I thought he got it.

And I'm taken back to the memory of rocking my child while "Oh fuck" was coursing through my body. Like, "Oh fuck," but I'm going to make this okay.

I took that on. With my will, I was going to make it different. Like taking the grief, the love, the soft stuff and forcing it all into a direction, I was going to make it okay.

I only ever use two bags when I leave the house. Every day, the red one or the leather one. And this week, in the third week my son has refused to come back to my house, and his father has refused to return him - like a respectable adult might - to my house, out of the unknown depths of the red bag pops this "It Ends With Us" movie ticket stub from last year. I have no idea where it came from, only that it needed to be seen now.

Three weeks after I'd kicked my son out one Friday night because I would no longer tolerate the escalating violence. Three weeks after the hardest decision of his life, sobbing the entire time, begging the police officer to make sure he got somewhere safe.

His dad was too intoxicated to drive and come get him that night.

Three weeks, then two weeks, after I realized that his father was not helping me to address the inappropriate behavior, but rather, was making me wrong and now punishing me by keeping my son. Feeling he needed to protect my son from me.

One week since I received the court custody change papers claiming that I am emotionally abusive and was provoking him which caused him to escalate.

It ends with us.

We shall see.

What Every Mother is Made To Do.

This morning, I cried before seven a.m. The dog was laying on my son's bed, which I've begun to let her do and I tell her to send him a "come on home" signal. I went to say good morning to her and unexpectedly sobbed onto her coat. She didn't seem to mind.

At forty-four, I know not to hold in my grief. I know the beauty of grief. I know that the deep waves of it, if felt, will open spaces down into the chest, heart, and the ache of being human that simultaneously makes you love even better than you loved before if only you just let yourself feel.

Tomorrow is my daughter's birthday. Twenty-five years.

Five years left. Four years left. No years left.

My son is right, in that something needed to change. I'd still been, at least partially, crafting a life in response to loss, and that's no way to live.

Yesterday I brought home purple flowers in three hues and set them up with candles and photos and have been feeling into how to respond to the custody claim.

I'll first say, selfishly, that I feel a calm that I haven't felt in years. There's no one escalating in an unsafe way in my home. There's no one slamming doors. I'm sleeping naturally without herbal support for eight to ten hours a night. I'm recovering. And it feels good to recognize this. To be a little selfish for myself and my health. To allow the reprieve as well as the grief.

Hopefully we will be given another chance.

Hopefully "we" are not ending, but "it" is ending. You know what I mean.

And per the custody, I have choices in how to respond.

One involves fighting in the way you know I know how to fight. I know how to be Mama Bear and I know how to take him down. And, I'm not that woman anymore. If my son were young, I would be her in a heartbeat.

But I've loved him. I've raised him. I was there for him in ways he can't see right now. And he's going into his junior year that may turn out to be his senior year. He doesn't need to be in court, he needs to be a student, a teen.

I was thinking to myself, "Isn't there a parable about a mother loving and letting go?" There is. I looked it up. It's called the Parable of Two Mothers or the Judgment of Solomon. You know it. Two mothers fighting over a child and King Solomon knows which is the true parent by the one willing to let the baby go so that the baby can thrive.

A mother doesn't let go because she's selfless. She lets go because she has to. Because it is the only option, sometimes, for the child.

Which yes, sure, is also selfless.

For his entire life, I tried to act in the best interest of the child. I can tell you now that I believe that what is in his best interest is to be with his mother, to be parented, to grow into a man of honor.

Apparently I'm entering into a situation where a court will determine what is in the best interest of the child, which I have no words for right now.

If my son needs me to let go, I will let go. And it will break my heart. But that is okay. Because it is the heart of the Mother. It is both a selfish love and the most selfless love in the world. Letting go is what no mother wants, but what every mother is made, eventually, to do. Sometimes incrementally, sometimes all at once.

What happens when a mother's primary identity is no longer Mother? I sense that is the invitation for me to explore. Two years earlier than I'd planned for.

Hold them close while you've got them, mamas. Whisper everything in their ear that you need for them to hear. Give them the names of strong ones and faith. Anchor yourselves to something steady in Grace.

There will be more essays, more talks, about the interference at play on our children. There will be more advocacy, teaching, and doing something about it. When my energy is ready to move in that direction. For today, for this anniversary day in what feels like this monumental year, thanks for reading my share.

In connection,

Sarah Poet

Purple flowers, a mother, and her two children.