A reader e-mailed me and asked if I would share more about my personal story with our home study. I am working through a series about each of the interviews we had as part of the home study process.

One of our interviews focused on expecting mothers. Our social worker, C, hoped to help us understand the pain that expecting mothers face when they place their babies for adoption.

At the time, I truly did not get it. I saw adoption as a solution to a problem. Hub and I needed a baby. The baby needed loving parents. The expecting mother needed someone else to raise her baby for her. Adoption was a solution to all three of the problems.

It was only after I met my son's then-expecting mother, T, that I got it. I could see how hard it was for her to carry a baby in her body that she was not going to parent. Until I met T, I really do not think anything that C said or did would have been able to get me to "hear" about the expecting mother's side of adoption. I was so focused on my own pain that I was not in a place to appreciate the expecting mother's pain.

Woven into this discussion was the topic of grief in adoption. This was something I definitely did not want to hear. I could sort of understand how a birthmother might feel loss, but she would move on with her life and be okay. (I now know that this is not the case.) However, I could not fathom why my adopted child would feel loss. I would love him enough that he would not feel any grief. This was another area in which I could not hear what C was trying to say.

In this same meeting, C talked to us about post-placement contact with the birthmother. The concept of post-placement contact was foreign to me and warrants its own post.

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Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt