Adoption and Self-Worth

Mark Schultz sings a song titled "Everything to Me". It is a song about a boy (himself actually) thanking his birthmother for the sacrifice of giving him up for adoption so that he would have a chance at fulfilling dreams she had for him.

I have always maintained that relinquishing my son for adoption had to do with love. I felt I had given him up for adoption because I was not the sort of person who would have made a good mother for him at that time in his life and I loved him that much. "A mother's love is something that no one can explain" (Helen Steiner Rice penned) and it doesn't just happen when you are married! But I felt unworthy. My sense of self worth was lower than zero due to the way society and more so, the way my parents made me feel. I am older now and realize that I still struggle with feelings of self worth , likely due to the experience of being a pregnant, unwed teenin the 1960s. It amazes me that we birthmothers were treated the way we were. The punishment handed out was not just the lost of our children but the loss of our self worth.



Anyway, back to Mark Schultz. Last I read he has not searched for his natural mother but he did dedicate a song to her. In the song he asks the question, if you passed me on the street, would you know that it was me? Would you stop or pass on by? My son asked me that question a while back. He asked me if I would have recognized him if I saw him on the street. I told him I thought my heart would know that it was him but that I wasn't sure I would have the courage to stop him.



For years before I had been found I would drive past an area on Northern Ontario and I would be in a panic. My heart would beat rapidly and my stomach would feel sick. I hated the area and would have to drive quickly through it. On one trip along the trans-Canada Highway with my daughter I started to cry for no reason. We had stopped at a donut shop and I was beside myself with tears and nervousness. I told her we had to get back in the car and drive on. We had to leave right then. I don't know if my son passed by or not to be honest but a few years later when I had been reunited I found out that the small town we had stopped in was the town he was living in at that time!!!

I hate it when people say that I should be happy that my son had a good life. I am not convinced that he would not have had a good life with me. Perhaps things would have been difficult at the start. One of my raised son's is almost thirty, married with a young child. They live with us right at the moment. How does that make it different than it would have been if my parents would have allowed me to have come home with my son for a few months or a few years. I don't think it is natural for a child to be seperated from their mother. When people say to me he had such a good life I wonder what they would say if we had been reunited and he was in jail or living on the streets?

We were told we were no good and we believed them... all of us first mothers who were given no choice in reliquishing our babies. That is likely one reason why I would not have stopped my son on the street. I would be too afraid that he would reject me because I wasn't good enough. I guess what Mark Schulz said in his song, you gave everything to me is really not true. If I had it to do over agan I would NEVER have allowed myself to be lied to and maniplulated into thinking that I had to give him up because I could not offer him what he needed. What he needed most was a mother's love, not any mother but HIS mother's love and what I needed most was to be able to give it. What I gave him was what I had been brainwashed into believing was the best. And, that doesn't count for anything.

If I had my life to live over again I would have found a way to have kept him, I don't know how I would have done it but I would have. He would be a different person today and so would I . His life without me was not bad. He was loved, but it was not the unexplained love of a mother who gave birth to him and I know that is different.

Thanks for listening to my rant for the day. His birthday is coming in a 6 weeks and I struggle with this time of year even now that we are in reunion.