One of the hardest things about being in an open adoption relationship, can be hearing from your child’s birthmother, that if she could go back, she would have never chosen adoption for her child.

While you might not fault a woman, for later feeling that her decision to place her child was not a good one for her personally, it is also hard not to feel blamed or inadequate if you are the adoptive family in question. It is hard not to feel like the source of the pain and regret.

While I doubt that adoptive parents expect their child’s birthmother to be blissfully happy about placing her child for adoption, we must on some level hope that she will feel some sense of peace with her past decision. Sometimes this knowledge of a birthmother’s regret might feel like we are also being striped of our entitlement to now parent our child. It can come as a shock, especially if time has passed, and contact has been positive to this point.

It becomes very easy for a birthmother who is experiencing this kind of regret, to perhaps become angry and blaming of the adoptive parents, after all they are the living example of what she has lost, and to whom. They are the parents she chose for her child, because she did not believe she could chose to be that herself for her child.

As adoptive parents you may have done everything ethically and with the best of intentions, but there is no real way to predict how a mother will feel about placing her child months or years down the road. If a situation changes drastically in a mother’s life, she might come to understand how she could have in fact parented her child, and her loss becomes intensified.

Most of us could surely understand the regrets involved, we may also have come to know our child’s first mother as a capable and caring person. But how does it feel, to hear that a mother who once entrusted us with her child to parent as our own, now wishes she had never done so? Even if she shares that her feelings have nothing to do with the adoptive parents themselves, I am sure on some level that they feel some guilt and struggle with the news. I believe that this then makes a difference in the way the adoptive parents may parent the child.

Perhaps this change of heart comes about after the initial “honeymoon” period of an open adoption, or after a birthmother goes on to have another, parented child. Many young mothers who might have felt insecure about their ability to parent their first child, may find that they would have done fine, once they have had the experience of parenting a subsequent baby. Maybe just time and maturity, or real life experience with adoption itself are the catalyst for regret.

If you are in an open adoption, talking about this with your child’s birthmother can hopefully avoid laying blame where it would not be productive in the relationship. Understanding that it is ok for a birthmother to experience this kind of regret, and not passing judgement about it, is important for adoptive parents to do. For birthmothers trying very hard to separate the way they feel about regretting their decision to place their child, from how they feel on a personal level about their child’s adoptive family is equally as important.

Regrets

Regret

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