What Birth Parents Carry

in I want to be honest about something: this is the perspective I know least from the inside. I wasn't raised by my birth family, and I'm careful about speaking for a room I've only stood at the edge of. But I've talked to enough people, and read enough letters, to know this much — a decision that happens once doesn't stay once. It gets revisited. On birthdays. On the anniversary of a date only one person is keeping track of. In grocery stores, at the sight of a kid the right age.

I don't think there's a version of that decision that doesn't cost something, whichever way it goes. Staying costs something. Placing a child costs something. I've heard from birth parents who would make the same choice again without hesitation, and from birth parents who think about it every single day with a grief that never fully resolves — and sometimes those are the same person, on different years.

What I'd want a birth parent reading this to know is that the child on the other end of that decision — at least this one — doesn't need you to have gotten it perfectly right. I needed you to have been a real person making a real choice under real circumstances. You were. That's enough of an answer for me.