Riding the Waves of Grief

Nothing Would Ever Be the Same Again

That was always the bit of irony about adoption. You went through this experience, this incredible perceived “sacrifice” and certainly a heartache for the ultimate plan to not have your life changed, but no one tells you how unavoidable that is.

You can’t have a baby and place it for adoption without the experience changing your very being.

Yet, that is how it is sold.

Adoption is suppose to remove the actuality of being a mother and having a child, but you DO have a child and you DO become a mother, but no one knows, and you can’t act like it, and you get treated all the same, but you’re not. I wasn’t the same. I couldn’t be. For one, my body was now the body of a mother. I had stretch marks galore on my now deflated belly. Granted I could get back into the coveted jeans and wear a belt again, but for anyone with any intelligence could glance at the roadmap of my life experience riddled on my midriff and know that I had produced a life. At nineteen, I would never have the perky breasts of a teenager again. Engorged with milk and left to dry on their own, they were never the same either. I had barely learned to be comfortable within my own body and appreciate my assets before I had a whole new body to learn about.


And there was this wound I carried; this open sore in my soul.

As I try to find words to explain the feelings post relinquishment so the true depth of the experience can be understood to the degree it’s magnitude demands, yet try not to have to feel it again, I am struck with the visual of a bleeding post birth womb.

So messy is a birth, so forceful; both always take me by surprise.

After your child rushes forth with a gush and relief from between your legs, you wait for the doctor to deliver the afterbirth. It takes a bit for your body to recover enough from the trauma of birth to contract again. The doctor waits, you wait, for the last contractions to kick in, and then he gently pulls on what is left of the umbilical cord hanging out of your body. It’s a rather odd experience, but after a real live person that you made comes out of you (and I mean that in the way that it is what your brain is thinking, that’s what it says. Like you knew that you were pregnant and you understood that a baby would happen, but OMG, it happened and it’s done and you did it and it’s a whole person!) anyway, the whole afterbirth cord thing is anti climatic.

Anyway, where the placenta was, adhered to you insides for nine months, growing and feeding the child within you, nourishing him where you were combined, joined as one; that area is an open wound in your uterus and it bleeds. At first it bleeds a lot, but then it slows down, but it’s a pain for quite some time. It’s a nasty period for four, five, six long weeks. Torn asunder, normally you go home with a newborn baby and a pants full of grandma pads. Usually you have had a nurse explain to you how you give yourself a sitz bath and watch to keep your stitches down below clean. This rather unpleasant aspect of child birth is overshadowed by the joy of a new baby, unless adoption was involved; then you get the grandma pads, the sitz bath and the gaping wound. Like a healing post birth womb, the adoption wound is huge and raw and open. It’s inside you, so it is protected. It just quietly bleeds all the time, it seeps and weeps and it bleeds.

And it deflates you. It makes you tired. You feel tender, but no one can openly see why. People should be gentle with you, you need them to be, you’re still healing, but they don’t know they should be, so they don’t treat you any different and sometimes that hurts and you want to scream so they can see your insides out. To the naked eye, you are one of them; you wear long sleeves on your soul so no one can see the hurt, so no one knows. There’s a weight you carry a sadness in your eyes that only some people will ever stop to truly see. And that will often remain with you for life.

For the pain from adoption was mine and I had to own it.

Often, the pain was all I had. It was MY pain. It was my connection to my child. It was the only thing I had that I could feel. It isn’t like I wallowed in it, because once engulfed in the throes of birthmother grief, it’s hard to return to the land of normal. It was not pleasant. But I learned when it swelled up inside me, a wave of deep child loss grief, I could not fight it, it was mine to embrace.

The best I can explain was that the grief comes over you like a sharp wave at sea.

Imagine being on a beach, standing at the waves and feeling a storm coming in. You have only two choices; stand on the beach and battle the storm of go out into the sea. The beach sounds like a better plan at first.. after all it is solid ground. So at first, as the storm comes in, it rushes over you and you try to stand still. You think that if you stand strong and hold your ground, then it cannot knock you down. But it’s a force much bigger than you could ever imagine and it hits all over, so strongly, and it takes all your strength to fight it. No matter how long you stand against the tide, it keeps coming in, and finally it knocks you down, unexpectedly, takes your breath away and you almost drown in the grief as the sea floods your lungs.

So you go out to sea, riding the huge waves of grief as they come in. You don’t fight them; you know you can’t, so you just try to stay above the water. Keep your head up and bob. You know that eventually you’ll get to the other side even if it takes so long that you feel as if you might just give up and give in, but what choice now do you have…you have to keep breathing. As long as you keep swimming above the waves, you’ll get to the other side. It was the only thing to do.

I could not avoid the waves of grief. 

I do not believe any birthmother can.

We all have an ocean to swim across in some way, what I fear is that there is never another side, just an endless sea.

I could not go around it.
I could not go over it.
I could not get out from under it.
I had to go through it, wave after wave, calm waters and storms.

You can’t not change with a wound that big nor can you really ignore it . You can’t fight it. It’s way bigger than you. It’s way bigger than you could have ever imagined.

There are times, and I have heard the same pitch of fear in many another new moms’ voice after relinquishment, when you have to admit that if you had known that it would be like this, then you would not have gone through with it. If you had only known, that it would be this bad, you might have rethought this whole adoption thing.

In fact, sometimes, when you have been riding an endless wave for hours and no end was in sight you really though that anything world have been better than this and really, this has to stop because you just can’t handle it! There are times when giving in and drowning seem rather more appealing by far.

Yes, I can say with a great deal of confidence, that most moms I know have experienced that feeling of emotional toll of adoption and relinquishment when they really felt that they just could not continue living with the level and intensity of pain anymore.

“I can’t do this much longer. It hurts too much. When is it going to stop?”

But I didn’t know this then. I somehow knew to ride the waves and keep it all at a manageable level.

I was right to do that and I was right about something else; it was the hardest most life altering experience that I have ever had to live through.

What I was not correct about was that I thought it was something to get through...once... and then it would be over and done with. Eventually you get through the grief, you process it and life becomes normal again… but that was wishful thinking.

It still gets me to this day how truly changing the experience was. Which is ironic really.. because one of the selling points in the adoption agency is that you get to follow your life’s plan.. you get to finish school., or be a normal teenager, or have other children “when you are ready”.. like you can use the magic eraser and with the stroke of the magic pen that you sign away your motherhood.. you’re not a mother… really. Like you can cheat life. Like you can alter reality.

But no matter what, it is just a piece of paper no matter how logically the plan seems.. a piece of paper cannot change your heart and soul. A piece of paper cannot turn off your insides. A piece of paper does not turn off the milk at your breasts. A piece of paper cannot remove your hormones. A piece of paper cannot take away the memories. A piece of paper cannot remove the motherhood inside you.. it can just keep you from knowing your child’s face, from knowing their name, from seeing their smile or hearing their voice.. inside you still bleed. Inside you are still a mother. Inside you still have scars. Inside your womb is still deflated and empty.

Still, I did not know this then.. so I kept swimming. Like Dory the happy foolish fish I was.. trying to forget, trying to be optimistic.. thinking that if I just kept swimming the storm would wash out to sea and I would be safe.

And at times, the waves of grief do calm down. The sea quiets. Maybe you find a raft to rest on. Maybe you find an island that looks like you could call it home. But we all know that the weather can change on a moment’s notice, that the sea is never truly quiet. The same is said for grief of a birthmother. It rises up when we least expect it. It can turn form a quiet summer night to a rough squall in seconds. And before you know it you are stuck either as a puddle of goo dying on the kitchen floor or choking for air riding the waves. I thought the endless sea was just a rough river to cross.. then I thought perhaps it was a lake where I could find peace on the other side.

So at first, the waves of grief were all I had left of my son and I rode them with pride. I deserved the pain. It was mine. I owned it and I was strong, so I could beat it, right?

I laugh at my foolishness now. My trusting younger self. Relinquishment cannot really be mitigated. All I can do is prepare my boat with the best provisions I have. I carry strong paddles with me now at all times. I am prepared to gulp the air right before I am forced under, for indeed, the waves of grief shall hit me again.

I know now that the scars will never trully heal. I know now that it is an endless ocean that lies out before me and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

And I know I must just keep on swimming.

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