Dear Adoption,
Can You Hear My Mother Crying?
They told her she couldn’t raise me. They told her it would be wrong to keep me.
Who could know that? How could they say those things? She would eventually succumb to the pressure and sign me away. Sign herself away from me. The accountability for what was lost falls on her and them but they will not suffer the punishment and sorrow she will endure. They benefit from our loss. Why do they think they know better? Because they want a child? Because they have no faith in her?
Perhaps some children are orphans. Perhaps some children’s parents cannot raise them. But, perhaps my mother could have raised me. The fact that they didn’t think she could doesn’t matter. When a mother stands up and wishes to raise her child, they have a responsibility to support her. But most of the time they don’t listen. They presume to know best, they say she is unfit and now they must listen…
Can you hear my mother crying?
Can you hear her guttural sobs, her wails?
Can you hear her reaching, clawing through the walls and doors and air that separate us?
And I, too cry and reach for her, but I am just a baby seeking nourishment, they say.
Every baby cries, they say.
But my cries are not simple. They are for her. Leave me without milk and bread but do not leave me without my mother.
For a child was not meant to be separated from the woman whose womb was once his home.
I can know safety, love, warmth beyond her but never in the ways they were meant to be known.
I can know nothing fully. My knowing was taken from me; hers from her.
Who am I beyond and in the absence of my mother? Who is she? Who are we?
And so we cry and grieve and suffer on. We love and exceed and move through but not beyond. To move beyond this loss is too big a hurdle. Life was taken and it cannot be returned.
From each other we will never move on. From each other we were torn for good or bad or both but mostly for suffering. She used to be my home and now neither of us can ever go home.