The Son I Don't Know posted 2/29/2008 12:40:58 AM | 7 kudos what's this?     report abuse tagged: son, adoption, missing, love, pain

MonkeyWoman29

I don't really know if this is the appropriate venue for expressing the feelings that I have tonight, it's just that I feel like I need to share it with someone before I burst. I love my friends and family and they mean everything to me; it's just that their understanding level of some of the things I have been through is so minimal that it makes it hard to talk about with them. Even my husband, he doesn't know half the hell I went through when I was younger, and when he does actually take the time to sit and listen, he gets angry, and he wants to fix things. He just doesn't seem to understand that there is no fixing the things that happened in the past; they are in the past, they happened, and that's that. There's crying, grieving, wishing they were different, but no fixing.

A lot of you know that I was raised in Foster Care. A lot of you know the reasons behind it. A lot of you don't. I won't go into those details because it's long and drawn out and would possibly bore you out of your tree or shock you to death, one of the two. What I will tell you is that when I was fifteen, I was sexually assaulted by a family friend to one of the Foster Home's I was in. No one believed me. Everyone assumed because I was in Foster Care and I had no 'raising' that I was naturally promiscuous and it was my fault that a nearly forty year old man made his advances on me. Anyway - that's a different part of the story.

The product of that assault, nine months later, was a beautiful, cherub-faced, curly-black haired, light-brown eyed, biracial baby boy. I was fifteen, just a baby myself, and I had no idea what I was going to do. The state told me that I had one of only a few options: They would pay for me to have an abortion, which would have to be out of state, because second trimester abortions were illegal in Kentucky at the time- ( I didn't find out I was pregnant until I was nearly eleven weeks along, I was young and it was not abnormal for me to be irregular) - or I could place my child in a foster home - separately- from me, or they would just take him and do with him what they wished.

First Choice: Hell NO.
Second Choice: Hell NO
Third Choice: HELL NO!

I knew what it was like to grow up in Foster Care. Why would I place my child into something like that, and subject him to some of the same things I had been through? I certainly wasn't going to have an abortion. I didn't know a lot of what I believed in when I was fifteen but I knew I didn't believe in that. I sure as HELL wasn't going to let them get their hands on him and put him up for adoption and take the chance I was never going to see him again. And they wouldn't let me keep him. I tried desperately to get help from every venue possible: Unwed Mother Homes, Shelters, even Catholic Churches. The state always stepped in, and I, being their ward, had no say in what happened in my own life, or to my own child.

So, I took matters into my own hands. I skipped school one day and took the bus down to the nearby Baptist Homes For Children Chapter. I met with a social worker and told her that I was interested in open adoption and asked her what did I need to do to get started. She gave me a huge stack of parental profiles of parents that were looking for children and told me to go through them. I went through them - one by one - there were at least a thousand of them. I made an appointment with one couple and they didn't want my child because of my history. Like I could have controlled my history. Well, their loss. I believe it's up to the parents to make their own child's history. Love the child, make it happy, give it discipline, structure, encouragement and understanding- and it will prosper. So I went back home, broken-hearted, discouraged, only to leaf through the thousands of pages again.

And I saw them. Two wonderful people who had a big fat black cat that they seemed to adore to no end. She had endometriosis (sp?) when she was thirteen and had a full hysterectomy. He was a therapist, so was she. How could my child lose with a couple full of understanding, commitment, and love? I made an appointment to meet with them, too, but I went into labor the day we were supposed to have dinner together. I was nearly three weeks early and they drove like maniacs to the hospital from however many miles away and sat with me, fed me ice chips, brushed my hair, and my son's adoptive mother watched as I pushed his tiny body into this world. Never once did they act as though this was strictly for them; they always made sure that I was OK, they brought me books, food, and offered me comfort and love.

All of that made no difference, however, the day I watched my social worker from the Home carry my son out of the hospital and put him in his adoptive Mother's arms. My heart screamed out for my baby; all I wanted to do was hold him close to me. Take him home with me. Raise him, love him, nurture him.

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