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Who Birthmoms Are


ElizabethAnn

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And here's another story of another great woman, Ontario MPP Marily Churley, who's done some amazing things with her life since placing her infant son for adoption-- including reforming Canadian adoption records laws, writing a book, raising a daughter, becoming a grandmother, and reuniting with her birthson and his family: Canadian Government Official Tells about Being A Birthmom.

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  • 1 month later...

"I think often times it is easy (for birthmoms) to feel left out on Mother's Day, but the reality of the situation is, we are still mothers," Coon said. "Not mothers who wake up in the middle of the night, potty train and carpool, but mothers who love a child enough to put aside their hurt, for their child, which is what parenting is all about."

Out of Nashville, TN, comes this tale of two mothers, united by love: Why Mary Alice Placed Her Baby After College Graduation.

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I think if birthmother's day were more prevelant we would be remembered more. I think everyone can get so wrapped up in being greatful to be able to be a mother on mother's day that some tend to forget why they were given that joy. Personally I have never had a mother's day w/o a call/card/etc... but I know birthmoms who have gone years w/o anything & that is SAD!

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We want our children's birthmothers to know how special they are to us!

While they each have their reasons for the types of relationships we have w/ them......we want them to each know the graditude of the gift that we call our children.

Each year we send a small token of our appreciation that arrives on birthmother day along w/ pictures.

I agree that birthmother day is way under looked by society. Trying to find a card that is good for each of our children's birthmothers is challenging as well......but so far I've been successful.

I hope that as we educate those around us they will the importance of Bithmom Day.

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We sent out Emelie's birthmother's card and I gave her our e-mail address. That is a big step for me since we do not have a current relationship. I don't know if she is still accepting our mail because she said she needed to move on but hopefully we can open the door of communication again. Emelie was adopted through a semi-open agency. I wish we knew about open adoption then. We would have done things very differntly.

Heather :)

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That is great news Heather. I know how much you want to start a relationship with Emelie's birthmother so I hope it opens the door for her, you and Emelie.

We have always sent Briton's birthmother and her birthgrandma Mother's Day cards and little gifts. I always want them to know how honored we are to be raising Briton and for them to realize that while they might not be here for all the milestones, they are a part of her life and we love them. I wish birthmothers were remembered more and especially on mother's day. People still look at me in amazement when I openly talk about Briton's birthfamily and how much I want them to remain in Briton's life, but it won't stop me. I think adoptive parents are a good source to begin paving the path of educating people on the importance of birthmother day.

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I know when I was picking out a Birthmother's Day card I did not see any. So I asked the lady restocking cards if they had any. Of course she said no. Hopefully if there are enough request one day they will start making them. Maybe we all need to write Hallmark.

Heather :)

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Here's a news story of two Tulsa birthmoms who chose open adoption and why: Openness Fills the Empty Spaces. I am trying to highlight all these stories here, because I am so proud to see brave birthmoms coming out of the shadows and telling their stories out loud! I think doing so is such a blessing for all triad members, because it helps the world around us better understand these decisions and the people who have to make them.

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Thank you for sharing these articles Elizabeth...I love reading stories in the media about open adoption. Hopefully more people are starting to "get it."

As a side note, I noticed the information at the end of the article for "The Birth Mothers Mass" to honor women who have placed children for adoption. This particular one was last night in Tulsa I presume, but I wondered if other places had one, particularly Memphis area. I am not Catholic, but I would love to go to something like this to honor our son's birthmom and all these strong women. I called my neighbor who is Catholic and asked her if she knew of a Birthmother mass. She did not, but it got me thinking. Does anyone go to a place of worship that offers recognition for birthmothers either on Mother's Day or other days? I think I need to talk to one of our church staff about this...

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From Buffalo, NY: How Brandy Went From the Lowest Point in her Life to the Highest in 14 Months.

And out of Canada: Why Ruby's first Mother's Day Card came 41 Years Late

Saluting Brandy and Ruby and all moms like them, on Mother's Day, Birthmother's Day, and all year through!

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My husbands niece, only 16 years old, had just found out (on mother's day) that she is pregnant. I wish that teens weren't given this romanticized ieal of being pregnant and being a mother. She is beside herself with excitement over this baby and having been in her shoes nine years ago when I had my son Jake, I was more worried about how I was going to finish school and work to support my new baby.I refused governmental assistance and did it all on my own. His father was never there and hadn't seen him since he was six weeks old. I never got any child support and everything I did for my son was all me. My parents helped out and still do sometimes, but most girls are not that fortunate. Guys will promis a girl the world to be with her and when a baby happens they are the first to get cold feet and run with the wind. Our county (Wichita County) was on dateline in Feb. 1998 for having the highest teem pregnancy statistics in the entire country! Someday I want to start a support group for teen mothers in my area to show them that it is not easy being pregnant and even harder to be a mom. I wasnt to show these girls that there are options and that they are really not alone!

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Nichole, You go girl!

Heather :)

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I'm not sure this is the best place for this, but I wanted to highlight some excerpts from her book, "In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart," by Ruth Graham (the daughter of Billy Graham). She is writing about her 17-year-old daughter Windsor who placed her little girl for adoption.

At the time, I could only imagine the storm raging in Windsor's heart. The Bible says, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Windsor had laid down her health, figure, and reputation to carry her baby to term. She had walked through the valley of the shadow of death to give birth. She was falling desperartely in love with her baby, knowing she would have to release her to the arms of others--a completely unnatural act. I realized I had never sacrificed as much as my daughter, and watching her caress her newborn child, I stood in awe of her.

As the adoptive couple departed, Windsor wailed and sobbed with unbelievable passion. Hers was pure grief. Pure despair. She was in agony. I was in agony. My heart broke doubly--first for the loss of my grandchild, then for my own child as I watched her disintegrate in front of my eyes. I could do nothing to comfort Windsor, nothing to help her. I could not make the pain go away. There was now a permanent hole in my daughter's heart, a hole I could not fill. Her grief was deeper than what many people experience in a lifetime, yet she was only seventeen. Most of her friends had just learned to drive.

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And another uplifting birthmother profile from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the county adoption clerk, herself, is both a birthmom and an adoptive mother: How Monica Got to be Employee of the Year .

In Eugene, Oregon, a mom of two chose an adoptive family of four as the perfect home for her newborn twins, and a special entrustment ceremony sealed their new covenant to each other: Two Families, Doubly Blessed.

But it's not just American birthmoms who are findng peaceful resolutions through open adoption plans. Across the globe, in Liberia, the birthmom of a four-year-old girl slept outside the orphanage where her child was being cared for, so desperate was she to ensure that her only surviving child would get adopted into a good home: For the Love of Patience.

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I'm not sure this is the best place for this, but I wanted to highlight some excerpts from her book, "In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart," by Ruth Graham (the daughter of Billy Graham). She is writing about her 17-year-old daughter Windsor who placed her little girl for adoption.

At the time, I could only imagine the storm raging in Windsor's heart. The Bible says, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Windsor had laid down her health, figure, and reputation to carry her baby to term. She had walked through the valley of the shadow of death to give birth. She was falling desperartely in love with her baby, knowing she would have to release her to the arms of others--a completely unnatural act. I realized I had never sacrificed as much as my daughter, and watching her caress her newborn child, I stood in awe of her.

As the adoptive couple departed, Windsor wailed and sobbed with unbelievable passion. Hers was pure grief. Pure despair. She was in agony. I was in agony. My heart broke doubly--first for the loss of my grandchild, then for my own child as I watched her disintegrate in front of my eyes. I could do nothing to comfort Windsor, nothing to help her. I could not make the pain go away. There was now a permanent hole in my daughter's heart, a hole I could not fill. Her grief was deeper than what many people experience in a lifetime, yet she was only seventeen. Most of her friends had just learned to drive.

Wow, Susan!!! Thanks for sharing...I'm definitely going to buy this book.

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I will be buying that book as well as suggesting it to a few friends who have placed. Then maybe I'll pass it on to my mom, who STILL, 8yrs later, belives her grief & sorrow is more important. Maybe whe'll learn something.

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Here is a horrific tale of a 17-year-old Palestinian birthmom, who gave birth and placed in December, 2002, then one month later, paid with her life for the sins of her family: Rest in Peace, Rofayda. (Caution: this is a very disturbing news report that is sure to leave you unsettled for some time after reading it.)

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This is just so sad. What an injustice to this girl. It amazes me the differences in cultural beliefs in different countries. I am so glad to be here in the United States. I hope the mother actually serves prison time for what she did.

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  • 4 weeks later...

From www.thesignal.com comes this startling reminder of the very stark circumstances under which some mothers are forced to place their babies for adoption, all around the world:

Notes from the Netherworld: Gloria Hallelujah

Commentary by Willy E. Gutman

Saturday June 9, 2007 (5th in a series)

Guatemala City -It is nearly dawn, but the sun has yet to rise behind the lush, mist-covered highlands to the east, and darkness still reigns.

Up since the cocks' first crow, Gloria races down the steep, narrow footpath leading to the murky waters of a rivulet a hundred meters below. Pressed to her bosom, swaddled in an old piece of cloth and still asleep, her infant daughter, Maya, is oblivious to it all. The course is overrun with pitfalls, but Gloria knows every crag, every loose pebble, every muddy ledge along the way. She has made the perilous trek 1,000 times or more since the birth of her baby six months ago, and she negotiates each obstacle with the agility of a veteran climber.

Laden with her precious cargo, a pail of water now balanced atop her head, she turns around and clambers back uphill. Midway, she stops to catch her breath. She must manage her strength. She is pregnant with her second child and she has hardly eaten in the past three days. But Gloria is no stranger to privation or pain. Personal discomfort no longer daunts her. She has Maya to care for. Another little one is on the way in five months or less; she's not sure.

Soon, night's inky mantle dissolves, baring a pale orange sky. A new day has dawned, bringing a fresh surge of anticipation and energy. Emboldened, she resumes her arduous climb.

Gloria is 14.

Reaching the summit, winded by the grueling ascent, Gloria wipes her brow and surveys her surroundings. Before her, shimmering in morning's first glow, stretches an unobstructed view of La Nueva Guatemala de la Asuncion. It is a million-dollar vista. Like all landscapes, majesty conceals malignancy and squalor, it cloaks mediocrity and evil, it enshrouds misery and indifference.

Behind her, perched precariously on the edge of a narrow bluff overgrown with nettles and stinkweed, rests the ramshackle hut Gloria calls home. Straddling a scaffolding of rotting wood pylons and corroded iron beams under which a small emaciated dog and a palsied cat cower, the windowless shack stands defiant in its vulnerability, a symbol of the paradox that is Guatemala - poverty festering in a setting of unparalleled beauty, and a testament to human endurance and hope.

Back inside, Gloria blows out the quivering flame of an old kerosene lamp and fans away the acrid emanations. She lays the sleeping infant on the floor, gently propping her head against a cardboard box where she keeps all of her possessions. There's a rag doll, an old tattered dress, a small bundle of used baby clothes, an old photograph, a broken comb, a tin of cereal, a jar of brown sugar in which tiny yellow ants have taken residence, a cross fashioned from ice cream sticks, a faded prayer book frontispiece in which an enraptured blue-eyed blond Jesus is seen levitating above a sea of sinners.

Gloria strikes a match, ignites kindling in the hollow of a cinder block and stirs a thin gruel of rice and water into a pitted metal bowl. She stopped breast-feeding Maya when she became pregnant with her second child. Underweight, her ashen skin pocket with mosquito bites, the baby girl suffers from severe malnutrition. Gloria looks at her daughter with a mixture of tenderness and disquiet as her own childhood, barely tasted, irretrievably lost, comes back to haunt her.

Battered and molested by her father since she was 2, savagely defiled and humiliated by her mother, Gloria is the embodiment of innocence undone, childhood compromised and corrupted by poverty, family conflict, alcoholism, drug addiction and violence.

Soft-spoken and unassuming, she reluctantly relives the nightmare by evoking it at my urging. Her narration, despite the horror it inspires, is childlike and flat. Her voice betrays neither anger nor sorrow. She smiles timidly instead, perhaps to hide the shame and pity she feels, not for herself, but for those who so sadistically deprived her of love and dignity.

"My father was always drunk. He forced liquor down my throat. Then he would have his way with me. I had to be very still or he would strike me. Sometimes my mother would watch and laugh. She smoked dope. She would blow smoke up my nose with a straw to make me high. If I winced she called me a whore."

Scars and welts speckle Gloria's arms. They are the handiworks of madness.

"Mother used to bite me. It went on for years. She snickered when I cried."

Gloria's ordeal ended about two years ago when, after six months in the streets, two rapes - one by a policeman - and a failed attempt at suicide, she sought help from a local child advocacy group. It was at a girls' shelter that I first met her.

Gloria has since left the shelter. When I visited back at the shack, I asked her what she wanted most. Fixing her gaze at the horizon where city meets the sky, then turning tenderly to Maya nestled in her arms and patting her own belly, the child-mother replied, "I have nothing and I have everything. I cannot ask for less or for more." She did not elaborate.

Last I heard, she had miscarried and lost her baby. She put Maya up for adoption and went back to the streets. In her world, nothing and everything are usually too much to bear.

---------------------------

Willy E. Gutman of Tehachapi is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991. His column reflects his own views, and not necessarily those of The Signal.

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Just a few facts and figures from today's conference seminar on birthparents, with thanks to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute:

* 90% of domestic infant adoptions in this country now entail some degree of openness;

* The majority of American birthmoms are adults, and most are in their twenties;

* Less than 25% of those who place are teenagers;

* Most birthmothers in the U.S. are high school graduates;

* 40-60% of American moms who place are already parenting other children;

* Those with the greatest levels of post-adoption grief are birthmothers who placed children with the expectation of information or contact but found it was later cut off or terminated.

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Just a few facts and figures from today's conference seminar on birthparents, with thanks to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute:

* The majority of American birthmoms are adults, and most are in their twenties;

* Less than 25% of those who place are teenagers;

* Most birthmothers in the U.S. are high school graduates;

* Those with the greatest levels of post-adoption grief are birthmothers who placed children with the expectation of information or contact but found it was later cut off or terminated.

I think a lot of people would be surprised by this information. Thanks for sharing the actual facts with us :)

Cathy

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Just a few facts and figures from today's conference seminar on birthparents, with thanks to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute:

* 90% of domestic infant adoptions in this country now entail some degree of openness;

HALLELUJAH

90% down....10% more to go! A goal worth striving for!!!

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Just a few facts and figures from today's conference seminar on birthparents, with thanks to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute:

* 90% of domestic infant adoptions in this country now entail some degree of openness;

HALLELUJAH

90% down....10% more to go! A goal worth striving for!!!

YAYYYYY!!!!!

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