Point of view of a seventeen-year-old adopted child,

[HarleyHarlow]

First of all, I was adopted as a baby and it was a closed adoption. I have writen a play and recieved high ratings about adoption (at a high school level, i'm working on getting it published). I love my parents (adoptive) more than anything in the world. They are my rock, they are the people who were there for me at 2 am when I cried as a baby. They were the ones who taught me how to ride a bike, and put make-up on, and play soccer. I am grateful.

However I am going to be 18 in just six months, and although that may seem like a bit of time. IT'S NOT. I've always wanted to meet my birth mother, but I don't know anything about her. There were days when I sat in my room crying, and I HATED HER. I mean, it was a woman I had never met (besides my birth) and really had never gotten to know, yet at some points in my life she was the source of all my hatred. If something went wrong it was her fault for putting me up for adoption.

I'm getting older now, and want to have kids of my own some day. I don't understand how you could throw your child away like that. It *****, but you put yourself in that situation and you should make it work. NOONE MADE YOU HAVE SEX WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND MOM! NOONE FORCED YOU TO! SO LIVE UP TO WHAT YOU DID.

I am in no way a supporter of abortion, and if you have to choose go with adoption, but I still feel you got yourself into it.

[polly22]

Hi, Harley,
   As a birthmother who had a good reunion with her birthson, some years ago, I really feel for you. You don't know who your birthmother is or why she gave, or had to give, you up, and it must make you feel angry--and sad, like she's gone, she wasn't there for you when you woke at 2 a.m. or any other time. Yet there is this automatic love for her too, whoever she is. Terribly, overwhelmingly confusing, I think. My birthson had to go through some (not all) of this, too, I think; he was in tears often when we first reunited---and so was I. Lots of the loss feelings are the same, strangely enough, in the mother too (not anger at having been, as the phrase wrongly puts it, "given up"--but at a society in which the only good way for the child to be raised is if one relinquishes him/her). You would do well to find a "support group" of adopted people, especially one with others in their late teens who are looking for or have found their birthmoms---probably best to do this, and to read some books by birthmothers and by adopted people, even before you do a search for your birthmother. Contacting this forum's a good start indeed.