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ADOPTED? YOU ARE LOVED!by Carol Janssen Were you adopted as a child? Are you an adult now? Have you never met your birth parents? If you answered yes to these three questions, you probably have tons of questions about why you were given up for adoption. In fact, you may have made up lots of stories about why you were placed for adoption. And that’s just what they are… stories. Until you know the truth about why you were placed for adoption, you probably think or imagine that you were given up for adoption because you were rejected. As a birth mother, I can tell you unequivocally that you were probably loved more than you could ever imagine. Please let me tell you about my experience as a birth mother and my birth daughter’s experience as she related it to me. Our story is not unique… there are hundreds of thousands of others who have had similar experiences. Your story could be similar. All I ask is that you consider the possibility, even the probability, that you were deeply loved at the time of your birth. In early 1972, I got pregnant by the man I was planning on marrying. We had become engaged and began planning our wedding. When I found out I was pregnant, our relationship deteriorated to the point where I knew that being married was the wrong choice for both of us…none of us would be happy. I broke our engagement and decided to also break up my relationship with him, the father of my baby. This left me with very few choices. I could have an abortion… this was legal at the time and in the state in which I was living. I could have my baby and raise her on my own. I could have my baby and give her up for adoption. The first option, abortion, was out of the question for me. Intellectually, I knew it was an alternative, but spiritually and emotionally it was not an option that I would be able to live with. The second and third choices were distinctly possible. However, after much soul-searching and weighing both options, I elected to relinquish her for adoption. During my pregnancy, I fell in love with my baby. With her first kick, I loved everything about her. I loved her movement, I loved her tiny body, I loved her hiccups, I loved her tiny fingers and toes as she grew inside of me. By the time I gave birth, I loved her more than I ever imagined possible. At the time and place of my daughter’s birth, the law required a thirty-day waiting period before the documents of relinquishment could be signed. During that waiting period, I wavered back and forth so many times, seeking God’s guidance throughout the whole process. Once again, I visited my reasons for not raising her myself. I knew that I couldn’t give her the kind of life she deserved, both a dad and a mom and a stable home environment. I wanted that for her more than anything else. I wanted her to be raised in a loving, Christian home where she would never doubt that she was wanted and loved. It never occurred to me that she might wonder some day about why I gave her up for adoption. After that intensely painful experience of signing those papers and walking away with such a heavy heart, I shut down my emotions. I shut my heart off from love and joy and happiness. I lived my life, acting as if nothing was wrong, acting as if my life was a normal one. But every single day, I was lying to myself. Every single day, I missed my daughter, loved my daughter, and prayed for my daughter. Because I had dedicated her to God in a formal ceremony before I left the hospital, I never once doubted that she was loved and cared for by a healthy, stable, Christian family. Never once did I lose my faith that she was in the arms of God, blessed and happy. Every birthday that passed, I spent most of the day thinking about my daughter… how old she was at the time and what she was experiencing. I continued to lift her up to God’s care, in complete faith that there was no need for me to be anxious or worried about her. Every day, my daughter was as close as my next breath. It wasn’t until about ten years after her birth that I sought counseling and was able to begin to heal from the hurt in my heart. I immersed myself in a spiritual and emotional journey that continues to this day, a journey toward health and wholeness with God at the center. And I loved my daughter even more, with every passing day, month, and year. It was almost exactly thirty years from the day of my daughter’s birth that I got a call from a judge’s office in the city where I gave birth to my daughter. I knew immediately what the call was about since I had no other business in that area. That same evening, my mother, my siblings, and I rejoiced together at the news that my daughter was looking for me. And I waited with intense anticipation to hear her voice for the first time. The call from my daughter, Annemarie, came three weeks later. What an amazing sound! It was like music, shooting stars, and fireworks all wrapped into one. I was so nervous, and so was she. And it was the beginning of an amazing exploration into who we are, what we believe, and how we can be in this relationship. After many hours on the phone and quite a few in-person visits, we got to know each other well enough to begin to trust each other with deeper emotions and secrets. Annemarie finally shared with me how angry she had been for so much of her life… angry with me for abandoning her, for not loving her, at least in her mind. She had been curious about me for a very long time and wanted to know more about me and about her biological history. She had spent countless hours, trying to imagine the reasons that I chose to give her up. Her conclusion was that it was because I didn’t want her, that I didn’t love her… she made up a story. I had been so focused on my own feelings that I had never thought about how she would feel about having been relinquished at birth. Oh, how I wish I had known or even imagined how she must have felt! I was so confident that she was loved and cared for that it didn’t even occur to me that she would be so angry. And she was loved and cared for very deeply. And she was angry. It was only then that I could open up to her at a much deeper level about how very much I had loved her and wanted so much more for her than I could ever provide. Ever since then, our path to building our relationship is sometimes smooth, sometimes rocky, but that conversation was the beginning of a closer relationship for us. Sure, we still bump up against other things that we differ on, but this is and will always be an exploration into who we are to each other and how we can be in relationship. We don’t have any models for this… for her as an adopted daughter who has found her birth mother, and for me as a birth mother. We do know that we love each other very, very much and desire a lasting relationship with each other. Nothing can ever come between us, now that we have so much invested in this relationship.
Did I love Annemarie when I gave birth and gave her up for adoption? Oh, yes, and so much more. And Annemarie knows that she was loved, every day of her life, by me, her birth mother, as well as by her amazing parents who adopted her and raised her with all their love.
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