A Sad Day: Happy Birthday From Your Birth Mother

Forty-five years ago today, I gave birth to the first person in the whole wide world who I knew to be a flesh-and-blood part of me. (I was adopted, so this was a huge deal.) Like today, it was a Sunday. The labor was long, and I was exhausted but elated to know that I would soon get to hold my baby, examine her to see if she looked like me, and love on the human I had been growing and praying for throughout my whole pregnancy. It was the happiest I’d been in my fifteen years of life.

But the day after her birth, I awoke with the crushing weight of dread pushing down on my chest. I didn’t know what it was right away because I was barely awake. When I opened my eyes and saw the sterile white of the hospital room, I remembered: I’m going to have to give my baby away. It never occurred to me that anything else was possible; everyone assumed that I would give my baby up. I accepted it as inevitable. After all, that’s what my birth mother had done.

I had been adopted when I was a baby, and my earliest memories are of my origin story. Mama used to tell me bedtime stories, and my favorite was of how she and Daddy flew far away to get me. Mama would say, “You’re special because we got to pick you out for our very own, and your mother loved you so much that she wanted you to have a mama and a daddy.”

As a child, I often wondered about the woman who gave me up. But I didn’t miss her or long for her because I already had a mom. My birth mother was simply the woman who loved me enough to give me two parents.

As I got older, I noticed that my friends resembled their parents and siblings, and I began to wonder who I looked like. When I hit adolescence, the feeling that I didn’t fit in intensified and I began acting out. For years, I thought my fighting, vandalism, and delinquency were a result of my sick and abusive father, but my eyes widened as I read about the research that had been conducted on adopted people.

I read in Adoption and Loss by Evelyn Burns Robinson that bonding begins in the womb and that during the period immediately following birth, newborn babies recognize their mothers through their smell, heartbeat, voice, and eye contact. When this doesn’t happen, the baby can feel “hopeless, helpless, empty, and alone.”

I also read that many adopted people “demonstrated a high incidence of juvenile delinquency and…consistently showed symptoms which were impulsive, provocative, and aggressive.”

Check, check, check.

Intellectually, I knew that I was special because Mama had told me so, but I’d never felt it. Instead, I felt a deep sense of unworthiness. How could I have value if I was discarded at birth?

When my daughter and I reunited eighteen years after I gave her up, I learned that she, too, had suffered from similar feelings and symptoms. She told me that she had been depressed on her birthdays for as long as she could remember. After celebrating with family and presents and cake, she would sit by the window waiting for me to come for her.

When I Facetimed her this morning to wish her a happy 45th birthday, I asked if she was sad. She said she was okay now but had woken up crying. I didn’t mention it, but I, too, am sad and have been crying on and off all day.

I said, “I wish I could just stop over to see you.” Unfortunately, she lives in the Midwest and I live in California. We are fifteen years apart in age, yet I relate to her more than I relate to anyone else on the planet. We are almost like one person. We look and think alike, and we have the same furniture, clothes, glasses, and hairstyle. We even bleach our brown hair blonde.

I hate how adoption makes me feel—the sadness I experience when I scroll through my social media feed and see my birth sister and other family members together at events I am missing from. I also hate how much I miss being with my daughter—going shopping, cooking together, decorating. And I miss watching my granddaughters grow up, attending their recitals, and just being their grandmother.

I read, “It is unnatural for members of the human species to grow up separated from their natural clan.”

Today is a sad day.