My Birth Mother is My Hero
Every year my mother tells me that the sky was the most beautiful azure blue that October of any Fall she can remember. She said they had forgotten to bring along a bottle and I screamed bloody-murder all the way from the courthouse to our home in Farmington.
When I was about four and first asked where I came from, my dad told me that I had been hatched on a stump. The wide eyed expression on my face made my dad laugh and laugh! Then the crinkles on his cheeks disappeared as he became quite serious. God had given me to them, he said.
I loved this story and listened each time he told it as if it had never been told before. As he spoke, I always pictured this young couple bouncing along a county road in the old Willes Coupe. Suddenly the blue sky turned golden and opened up, and as angels sang, a soft, round bundle was gently handed down into their arms. It is a wonderful memory. I was a planned and wanted child.
I was born October 9, 1953 at Crittenden Home in Peoria, Illinois to a young woman who possibly came from the Champaign or Mattoon area. In those days, pregnancy for a teen meant a hasty wedding, an adoption, or a secret abortion, often self-induced. My very brave birth mother chose to make an adoption plan for me.
I know little about the woman who made this choice, not even a name. She was a young teen who had been in trouble and had become a ward of the court. She lived in a single-parent home with only her father so she was placed in a group home for unwed mothers.
Since most of their lives were spent in seclusion, church ladies from the community would often bring gifts to these girls on holidays. Because their identities could never be known, the packages were left in the yard under the trees and when the visitors left, the girls could go outside and pick them up.
Not a birthday or Mother's Day passes that I don't think of this frightened young girl, for that is the only way I remember her. She asked to see me on the day of my adoption so I was dressed in pink and a nurse took me in to her. She held me for a long time and said my name should be Karen. And she cried.
I must have seen her then, the memory of her face somehow recorded in my memory but never to be retrieved. I often wonder if she ever married or became a mother again, if she was able to go on with her life in some normal fashion. I wonder if she was able to exchange her grief for grace.
I have a small porcelain music box, now a little charred from a house fire a few years back. It plays "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and was given to me one Mother's Day by my oldest son when he was just a small preschooler. How excited he was as his chubby little-boy fingers presented it to me!
My children are the sunshine in my life. I know the pain and joy of being a mother, of the sense of immortality that comes with being a part of the future through the lives of your children. I know the blessing of grandchildren. In their faces are the unfamiliar marks of a past generation. The round "kitty noses", the green eyes, the maverick blonde hair, these are not of their father. These are secret gifts, left under our family tree by strangers we will never know.
But beyond that, I have tasted life and all the fullness it brings because of one woman's great choice to give me that life. I may be the only child she ever had and she may not even celebrate Mother's Day. But each year on this day, I thank God for her and for her part in His sovereign plan for my life.
She held me close to her heart for 9 months. She didn't scream that it was her body and somehow I was an intruder. She didn't become a victim, though she may have been a victim of rape or even incest. Instead, she lovingly endured the shame of a teen pregnancy and the pain of childbirth so that I could have life.
In this day when a women's rights are the ultimate goal of some, I want to thank this young woman who set her personal rights aside for me. The spirit of our age is not one of nobility or sacrifice. My children's generation knows little of doing the courageous or the inconvenient.
But there are heroes today. The young woman who finds herself in an unplanned pregnancy and chooses to give her child life, she is my hero. The teenager who tenderly places her child into the arms of a mother who cannot bear her own, she is my hero. And wherever she is this Mother's Day, my birth mother is also my hero. May she be blessed today and always.
-Submitted for the Mother's Day Contest by Karen Campbell, mother to six and grandmother to six. Karen says, "This is an essay I wrote about my birth mother. I was adopted when I was 6 days old and believe that my birthmother is truly a hero. I would like to encourage others to paint a positive picture of adoption so that women who find themselves in an unplanned pregnancy will choose to make an adoption plan for their babies."
When I was about four and first asked where I came from, my dad told me that I had been hatched on a stump. The wide eyed expression on my face made my dad laugh and laugh! Then the crinkles on his cheeks disappeared as he became quite serious. God had given me to them, he said.
I loved this story and listened each time he told it as if it had never been told before. As he spoke, I always pictured this young couple bouncing along a county road in the old Willes Coupe. Suddenly the blue sky turned golden and opened up, and as angels sang, a soft, round bundle was gently handed down into their arms. It is a wonderful memory. I was a planned and wanted child.
I was born October 9, 1953 at Crittenden Home in Peoria, Illinois to a young woman who possibly came from the Champaign or Mattoon area. In those days, pregnancy for a teen meant a hasty wedding, an adoption, or a secret abortion, often self-induced. My very brave birth mother chose to make an adoption plan for me.
I know little about the woman who made this choice, not even a name. She was a young teen who had been in trouble and had become a ward of the court. She lived in a single-parent home with only her father so she was placed in a group home for unwed mothers.
Since most of their lives were spent in seclusion, church ladies from the community would often bring gifts to these girls on holidays. Because their identities could never be known, the packages were left in the yard under the trees and when the visitors left, the girls could go outside and pick them up.
Not a birthday or Mother's Day passes that I don't think of this frightened young girl, for that is the only way I remember her. She asked to see me on the day of my adoption so I was dressed in pink and a nurse took me in to her. She held me for a long time and said my name should be Karen. And she cried.
I must have seen her then, the memory of her face somehow recorded in my memory but never to be retrieved. I often wonder if she ever married or became a mother again, if she was able to go on with her life in some normal fashion. I wonder if she was able to exchange her grief for grace.
I have a small porcelain music box, now a little charred from a house fire a few years back. It plays "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and was given to me one Mother's Day by my oldest son when he was just a small preschooler. How excited he was as his chubby little-boy fingers presented it to me!
My children are the sunshine in my life. I know the pain and joy of being a mother, of the sense of immortality that comes with being a part of the future through the lives of your children. I know the blessing of grandchildren. In their faces are the unfamiliar marks of a past generation. The round "kitty noses", the green eyes, the maverick blonde hair, these are not of their father. These are secret gifts, left under our family tree by strangers we will never know.
But beyond that, I have tasted life and all the fullness it brings because of one woman's great choice to give me that life. I may be the only child she ever had and she may not even celebrate Mother's Day. But each year on this day, I thank God for her and for her part in His sovereign plan for my life.
She held me close to her heart for 9 months. She didn't scream that it was her body and somehow I was an intruder. She didn't become a victim, though she may have been a victim of rape or even incest. Instead, she lovingly endured the shame of a teen pregnancy and the pain of childbirth so that I could have life.
In this day when a women's rights are the ultimate goal of some, I want to thank this young woman who set her personal rights aside for me. The spirit of our age is not one of nobility or sacrifice. My children's generation knows little of doing the courageous or the inconvenient.
But there are heroes today. The young woman who finds herself in an unplanned pregnancy and chooses to give her child life, she is my hero. The teenager who tenderly places her child into the arms of a mother who cannot bear her own, she is my hero. And wherever she is this Mother's Day, my birth mother is also my hero. May she be blessed today and always.
-Submitted for the Mother's Day Contest by Karen Campbell, mother to six and grandmother to six. Karen says, "This is an essay I wrote about my birth mother. I was adopted when I was 6 days old and believe that my birthmother is truly a hero. I would like to encourage others to paint a positive picture of adoption so that women who find themselves in an unplanned pregnancy will choose to make an adoption plan for their babies."
posted by Crystal Paine at 11:36 AM
2 Comments:
What a beautiful post, Karen. As my husband and I await word from China as to the daughter we will adopt, I pray for her birthmother relentlessly: For the decision she must make, and for the child God destined to be mine. Adoption is an amazing thing, and I hope our daughter (and the many that follow her!) will develop those same feelings for the woman who gave her life. Thanks to Crystal for printing your beautiful words.
kim
That is really beautiful! My great-grandmother was one of those heroic women also. In a time where you did not have babies out of wedlock, she worked very hard inorder to save her baby- my grandmother. She was adopted into a very wonderful home and we found her birth mothers family when my grandmother was over 60 years old. She never met her mother, but met her sisters and brothers. The fact that she had a baby was so hidden that the father of the family went to his grave never knowing about it. Only 2 people in the family knew.
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