One of the things I related to most in Jessica Lost was the chapter describing how Bunny behaved when she became an everyday parent after relinquishment. I’ve talked about post-placement parenting before, both in how it changed me and how I encounter difficult scenarios that not everyone does. To hear Bunny talk about it, though we came from different generations, made me feel normal, something I don’t always get to feel when it comes to the topic of parenting or adoption.
I never told my children about The Baby. When they were little, I thought they’d think I might give them away, too.
But later there was never a right time, never a moment in which I could say that I’d given away my first child.
There are obvious differences between my experience and Bunny’s in that quote. My children know and have always known. On the night that my first son was born, I sat in the rocking chair with him by the window, looking out on the hospital lawn at all of the Christmas lights. My husband was taking a shower as I rocked and told my firstborn son about his sister — my firstborn. There has never been a time when they didn’t know her name, didn’t know about her.
But I still harbor that fear that they will have their own fears about family permanency. BigBrother has been hinting around some of his fears as he begins to ask more questions and talk more freely about adoption and its process. I work on reassuring them that they aren’t going anywhere without using language that would be scary in itself. I’ve never verbalized, “I’ll never give you away,” because, knowing my oldest, he would think, “Why did she just say that? Does that mean she could or would?” And we’d be on a cycle of questions for four days straight. I try to talk about families being forever and how we love each other no matter what. But BigBrother’s question is coming soon. I hope I’m ready.
The birth of The Baby, and her loss, certainly affected the kind of mother I became: over-protective, full of the fear, without identifying it, that I would lose another child, that the baby would be taken from me.
The difference here is that I do identify that fear. It shapes my every move, my every decision in parenting. I have learned and continue to learn how to parent around it or, really, how to parent with that fear. I was discussing this very thing with Dawn and Kate the other day, about how I’ve had to work so hard to land this helicopter and how there really are no resources for parenting with this fear. I’ll go along for a few weeks at a time and think I’m doing great; I’ll sit at the park while they play and read a book instead of hovering, hovering, hovering. But then BigBrother walks away from me for Kindergarten screening and I cry because I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing or who he’s with. I can’t stand the not knowing. And so I fall back into realizing that my parenting is forever shaped by that loss, that fear.
I was much less of a mother than the woman who adopted her, who was there for all those things, who picked her clothes up off the floor, and taught her to say “Please” and “Thank you” and who sang lullabies at night. I hoped she sang lullabies.
But if love counts — and it must, at least a little — then I am also her mother, because I loved her. I loved her for four days, and for forty-two years, and forever.
Yes, I blubbered all over myself at that point.
I remember in the early days of our open adoption when we were still floundering around our roles and our titles. Dee asked me if I would just rather be called “mother” instead of “birth mom” or “first mom” or any of that jazz. I balked. I straight up balked. I had been all but brainwashed by my non-agency to simply be the birth mom. I look back on that and wish I would have had the common sense to see what gift was being offered to me. But, to be honest, it doesn’t matter to me that I am now simply Jenna, her [Munchkin's] birth mom. I know who I am. I am secure in my role in her life. I have always loved her. I will always love her. And it counts.
It counts.
[Disclosure: I was provided a free copy of the book. My honest review can be found here.]
by Bunny Crumpacker and J.S. Picariello was a difficult book for me to read. It took 
Jessica Lost is really a must read for all sides of the triad with the caveat that it is a hard read at times. Adoption is not all butterflies and roses; it is loss, it is hurt, it is confusion, it is secrets hidden from ourselves, others and society. Being able to recognize that we all have our own unique stories but that there are still some aspects of adoption that tie us all together is also important going into this book. This story is not your story or your mother’s story or your child’s story; this is the story of Bunny, Jil and those in their lives. But this story may help you understand things you maybe never thought to think about, whether related to your own experience or that of someone else in your life.