What Birth Parents Carry

What Birth Parents Carry

I don't know my birth parents' story in detail, and I'm careful about what I say here because it isn't only my story to tell. But I think about them more than people might expect, and I don't think about them with anger.

There's a narrative that shows up a lot in conversations about adoption, where the birth parent is either the villain of the story or erased from it entirely — mentioned once, briefly, and then never again. Neither version has ever sat right with me. Whatever circumstances led to a parent placing a child or having a child removed from their care, I have to believe most of them were not simple, and most of them were not without grief on that side too.

I've talked to other adoptees whose birth parents searched for them for years. I've talked to some whose birth parents never did, and who have had to make peace with not knowing why. I don't think either of those outcomes tells you what kind of person someone is. People make decisions inside circumstances the rest of us didn't live through — poverty, addiction, age, pressure from their own families, options that weren't really options at all.

I'm not writing this to excuse anything specific, because I don't know the specifics of every reader's situation, and some of those situations genuinely involved harm that shouldn't be minimized. I'm writing it because I think birth parents deserve to be talked about as whole, complicated people rather than a single sentence at the start of someone else's happy ending. That's true whether or not they ever come looking, and whether or not we ever go looking for them.