A Mother's Love Liberates

"A mother never forgets her child."


I have been thinking alot about this phrase the last few days, and the faces of the many women who embody the statement.

On Tues. night, the baby and I drove up to visit with D. (jubilee's 1st mom) It was D's 22nd birthday, and it was also birth-mother support group night for our agency and D wanted me to go with her. It is just one of the many wonderful services our agency provides life long for birth families. Adoptive parents are welcome to attend, an invitation that both humbles and amazes me.

From what I've been told, these meetings can some nights be fun and light-hearted, and other nights they discuss weightier issues. Tues. was a weighty issue night. The pain those women carry seems overwhelming. Not just pain about their adoption plan, but pain from a life full of damage - some inflicted by others, some inflicted by self. To witness their wounding was in a word heart-wrenching.

One young woman there had only several months ago placed her three-year-old son she had been parenting with a family. I happen to know the family, as the adopting mom helped facilitate our adoption at the hospital. I had seen pictures of her newest son, and heard parts of their adoption story. When we arrived and had all sat down, another bmom handed this woman a picture of her son, the same new pictures I had seen at the hospital. She immediately started crying, and holding the picture near to her heart. She was unable to speak and could only hold her son's picture and cry.

I have heard many callous and IGNORANT statements made by those outside of the adoption triad, about how first mother's can't possibly love their children with the "right" kind of love or else they would never place for adoption. THese statements infuriate me, and ANY person that has such thoughts, or expresses these opinions should sit with these wonderful, amazing, broken women, for ONE night and hear their stories - be faced with their pain.

As I looked around the room, at the many faces - some older than me, some younger, some the same age, all from different backgrounds and stations in life, some who had already placed children for adoption, others just getting ready to, and some only weighing their options - I was struck with how much these women love their children. To suggest their love is some-how less than the love parenting mother's have for their children is completely false and offensive. The love they have for them does in fact require of them something I myself am not willing to give. It is the love that recognizes they can't provide for their baby what they deserve and therefore it is a love that requires them to allow another set of parents to raise their child - another set of parents to be called mommy and daddy - another set of parents that will experience all the things that they themselves may only hear about through letters, or phone calls or witness from afar in pictures and videos. I don't believe I personally possess what it takes to be that selfless, that loving.

One of my favorite quotes - given to me on a picture from my oldest daughters birth-grandmother says " A Mother's love liberates" - maya angelou


I find myself struggling with this very thing as my Jorja Grace get older and is preparing to enter school years. But I think this statement is so true and representative of what my role as a mother is. And that is to best prepare my daughter for all things in life and then allow her the appropriate freedom at the appropriate time to be who God has called her to be. It is the kind of love that places other's needs above self, no matter the pain, no matter the fears, no matter the outcome of being left-behind. I believe this is the kind of love a first mother has for their babies-the willingness to release them to a life they believe will be better, a life that will allow their child to become who God has called them to be - but it is a life that will forever change the role that they could have had in their child's life.

There are many things that I had to "miss out on" not having biological children - pregnancy, birth, seeing mine and my husbands physical features in a baby, and many more... but that was not by choice. When I consider all of the things and experiences a first mother must choose to sacrifice I am humbled and incredibly grateful. I will never fully understand making a decision of that magnitude and am so thankful I will not have to.

These women LOVE their children and should be given nothing but the highest honor and esteem for loving their children in a way no one else can. A mother never forgets her child.

I hope I will bring my girls up knowing how amazing their first moms are to me. And how much they are loved by ALL their family.