An Open Letter to Birth Mothers

This is to all birth mothers. All the ones who have given up or plan to give up their child so someone else can be a parent.

I know you get a bad reputation. You get looked at as less because you have or are going to give up up your child. You should know that you are not. You are brave. You have made a choice that I can’t imagine making. I don’t know what has happened to you to get you this point. There are countless reasons and I’m not here to judge you for whatever that reason may be. That’s not the point. The point is that you are brave enough to carry a child for 9 months and give it up to give someone like me a chance to be a mother.

I’ll admit that at one point I was angry with women like you. Women who seemed to be able to get pregnant even though you didn’t want it. Women who had what I so desperately wanted and couldn’t have. I was angry because I wanted it to be me. It seemed like a cruel joke that as someone who has dreamed about having a family their whole life couldn’t, while someone who hadn’t planned for it could. I was angry and I was bitter. For that I want to apologize. Nature isn’t something you can control any more than I can.

Now I want to say thank you. Thank you for being brave enough to decide to give your child life. Thank you for choosing to let that little life inside of you to grow and have a chance. Who knows, maybe you are carrying the one who will cure cancer or become president. If you had chosen to end your pregnancy we would never know. So thank you.

Thank you for knowing, that for whatever reason, you want better for your child than what you currently have. Thank you for wanting to give them more. I think it’s a misconception that giving up your child means you don’t love them. And I know there are cases where that is true. But I also know that to me, that’s the ultimate act of love.

So as a future-adopted-mother to a birth mother, I want you to know. I want you to know that the child you are carrying is already adored. That it has been prayed for, and talked about for years. That the excitement and anticipation runs through not only me and Joe but our whole families as well. I can’t explain how we can be in love with a child we have never seen, never heard the heartbeat, or even know when they are coming, but we do. We have names picked out. We have nursery ideas all ready. We wander through baby stores picking out things as we dream about what our baby will be like. We have places we want to take them, things we want to teach them. We want everything possible for them. The one thing I want you to know beyond everything else is this, your child, our child, will be so loved. Never will they doubt or be unsure of our love, never will they not know how much we care. This is a promise I can easily make, because I know how much we already love our baby. I know that love will only grow with every moment that brings us closer together.

So again, Thank you. Thank you for being brave. Thank you for giving us a chance. Thank you for giving us the greatest gift. Thank you.

Rachel