Author and adoptive mother Sally Bacchetta writes about a variety of adoption-related issues from an adoptive parent’s perspective, including thoughts on her child’s birth family.
Back in 2010, Sally Bacchetta wrote a book entitled What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent’s Perspective. It’s a book that’s noteworthy for its straightforward honesty, and the ten chapters that make up the book cover a lot of ground in just a bit over 100 pages of text.
We found Sally’s writing to be very poignant, and we’d like to share some of her thoughts regarding her child’s birth parents:
“I think about your birth parents. Often. More often that I expected to, and probably more often than you realize. How could I not? They changed my life in a way that no one else could.
Sometimes I deliberately call them to mind, like on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. I’m a mother because of them. She’s a birth mother because of me. I wonder what Mother’s Day means to her. Does she feel like she’s your mother? Does anyone ask her about you or celebrate her as a mother? I wonder if she has other children, and if they give her the same kind of homemade cards you give me, and if, while holding one of their hand print paperweights or soup can bud vases, her mind wanders to you. I imagine it does. I imagine she misses you. I wonder if she feels in her bones how right her decision was. I hope she does. I do.”
Bacchetta goes on to acknowledge that her child’s birth mother wishes that she could have parented. “She wished she could raise you. She wished she could give you joy and discovery and security and health, confidence and opportunity and wisdom and peace, but she knew she couldn’t. She knew she didn’t have the maturity or consistency or support to create the life she wanted you to live. She wanted you to be able to plan a future and have the means to pursue your dreams. She wanted you to belong to a strong, healthy, joyful family. She wanted you to have parents who could be everything she wished she could be for you. And so she did what all good mothers do. She gave you what you needed. She gave you me.