I’m sitting in Starbucks in between business meetings. There is a reporter next to me interviewing a woman about trends and norms that she sees in the adoption process. From her responses, it sounds as if she works for an agency. Possibly a counseling center that works in conjunction with an adoption agency. She has the book, Growing Givers’ Hearts, in front of her.
“Do girls ever change their mind in the process?”
“And decide to keep the baby? Yes, it happens.”
“No, change their mind and have an abortion?”
I was twenty-two when I learned that my birth mother had three abortions before she became pregnant with me and decided to give me up for adoption. I always knew I was adopted. My parents never kept that a secret from me. I’m grateful to them for that. They didn’t share this particular piece of information with me, because they weren’t aware of it themselves. My birth father was the one who told me after I met him that year. Why he told me, I’m not quite sure. He even started out by saying, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this …” It was likely meant to be a stab at her. Even though he had been the father of all four children, he made it seem like he never had a choice in any of her pregnancy decisions. Alluding to this made him appear as if he cared at the time, when in all likeliness, he probably didn’t. After all, he was my blood, so being manipulative was likely.
I had always thought of my birth mother fondly. When people learn that you are adopted they often ask, with a look of pity in their eyes, if it is hard to know you weren’t wanted. On the contrary, I always felt particularly wanted. Handpicked if you will. I regarded my birth mother as supremely unselfish, believing that fulfilling a pregnancy only to let your child go so that they can have the best life possible was the ultimate expression of love.
So when I found out that I had been number four, and that it was my birth grandmother who insisted upon an alternative to yet another abortion, I wonder if I had pegged this woman inaccurately. Perhaps I had been wearing rose colored glasses. Maybe I was truly unwanted. An afterthought, or a nine-month-long nuisance. Only years upon years of useless, self indulgent therapy could tell me for sure.
Instead, I choose to look at her with the same compassion that I try to bestow upon others, even myself. She, like everyone else, did the best she could with what she had. Isn’t that what we are all really doing? We make mistakes. We hurt one another. We make decisions based on what we hope is the right thing, but always keeping ourselves most in mind. And that’s okay. We are all doing the best we can with what we have. There are times when I’m not working with a whole hell of a lot, and thus, my best isn’t all that grand. I would imagine that my birth mother probably wasn’t working with a lot when she had those abortions. It causes me to wonder if the reason her “best” improved a bit when she decided to continue with her pregnancy was because she had more to work with. She had support.
I recently heard some commentary from a woman named Alexandra Asseily, whose thoughts only strengthened the need for this way of thinking. She said—“Forgiveness allows us to actually let go of the pain in the memory. And if we let go of the pain in the memory we can have the memory, but it doesn’t control us. And I think it’s the fact that when memory controls us we are then the puppets of the past.”
