The child I gave up 16 years ago wants to meet me

[newname321]

I had a baby when I was 14. I never even considered keeping the baby and wanted him to go to a "proper" family rather than stay with a single teenage mum.

I was in the USA and my parents organised a private adoption. My mother knew the couple through work and assured me they were great. At the time I wrote the baby a letter about why I could not keep him and it was agreed I would get photos and updates once a year. It was also agreed my identity would not be revealed until he was 18.

The photos and updates have been lovely and have assured me that I made the right decision. I have never wanted more contact or regretted anything.

He is now 16 and I have just heard that he knows my identity and wants to get in contact. I am feeling very guilty because I don't want contact. I know his life is happy, I know my life is happy. I can only see heartache for both of us if we try and change how things are.

Am I terrible for feeling this way? Is it cruel to simply write to him and explain I have always wanted the best for him and wish him nothing but happiness but I know that happiness will not come through us meeting?

I agree Kew is making a lot of sense, it sounds like she has experience in this area.

I think that baby steps are needed here and you really need counselling, particularly if you didn't have any at the time. Please don't say no outright, do you think you could try letters and see how it goes?

[sorry for minor hijack] Kew, your DS is gorgeous! I love the 'Boden pic' on your profile, he's stunning!

goodluck (())

I'm the same solidgold. Get to a certain point and then drop it all. Can't quite understand what is stopping me.

good luck with the pregnancy newname, I'm sure thats complicating everything for you. There no tearing hurry to make any instant decisions and as you say the practicality of the situation would slow it down anyway so you do have time to mull things over.

I'm hugely grateful that my son's birth mother took the decision to give birth to him and to go to a hospital when she went into labour at 26 weeks which without a doubt saved his very precious life. Even if she never wanted to lay eyes on him again, she has my undying gratitude for that alone.

I rally wish you all the best - and of course him and his parents too!

Newname, I would take your time over this and start off with letter contact when you are able. That was a very traumatic ordeal to go through at the age of 14 and I would seek counselling to speak to someone about all your concerns. Why don't you phone the national adpotion line and ask for advice? Good Luck.

seeing he is so far away could you maybe have letter contact first, might help both of you. He sounds like he has wonderful people bring him up, and you have your own family, but hope it works for you.

HIJACK - flibertyplus2 keep your eyes peeled for a limited time chat thread of a montage of DS tonight - I have been persuaded to "release" it.

I was adopted as a baby and I have met both my birth parents

My dad is an aussie {and lives in OZ so I went to see him there} and my mum in Uk

I really think you should see him once to let him know what you are like

Has he seen photos of you from 16 years ago and now

COs that would be good for him IME and IMHO

Please agree to send some photos of you to him

Good luck

He will want to know where his nose comes from or his eye shape or his chin etc

The same as your children that you have look like you or your DH oyswim

He won't know where his looks come from you or his birth dad

Oh gosh, newname, this would be confusing and painful enough for anyone, but you are pregnant too? No wonder you are stressed.

Think the decision to look into counselling is very wise. Some v. good posts here (and one or two appalling ones).

Would it be possible to send him a 'holding' message, as someone suggested?

What a complicated and difficult situation for you newname. You were SO young. I suspect that if you contact your adopted son and just remind him that you were 2 years younger than he is now that he will step back a bit in shock. From what you have said I also think that you have not really dealt with what you went through.

I do not have any direct experience other than that my DH is adopted. Is totally uninterested in contacting his bio mother. He feels it would be disloyal to his adoptive parents - interestingly enough both are dead now.

I have a friend who is adopted also and by the time she traced her birth mother it was too late - she had died 6 months earlier. Coincidently she herself had a child at 16 and had him adopted. She went on to marry and have 4 DCs. Her DH has always known about her past. Her adopted son tracked her down and they met a few times. He wanted nothing but to put a face to the mystery. They have met frequently and get on well. But he has his life and she has hers.

I think you shouldn't rush into anything. You have a lot of thinking to do. You have my huge sympathies. You have obv buried your past quite deeply. And why not? You were just a child.

Personally I think that it would be a good idea to start contact. Take it slowly and see where it leads. As someone said earlier I think you are in denial. The fact that very few people in your life know about him tells me that you have strong emotions still to deal with in this matter and counselling may be a good idea.

Ok after having said that I must point out that I am one of those that knows what I am talking about. 20 years ago I gave up a boy for adoption when I was 15. I have never kept it from anyone, well close friends and all my relationships have known from very early on. My dss(14) knows about him as will my ds(4) when he gets to the age thathe will understand. I am proud of the fact I have given life to a beautiful boy, well a man now! I had contact with his parents all through his childhood and I was always known as "nzshar" his birthmum. We did lose contact when I moved over here for a few years as he approached teenage years and I was in my selfish 20's. When I was pregnant with ds I thought it only fair to let him know he was to have another blood relative so we made contact again. He emailed me a few times but thats it. I leave it up to him know and if there ever is a time he wants to meet up I will be here and will have to answer some very difficult questions for him and me but it will be nessercery.

Suppose what I trying to say is that all those years ago I knew in my head and in my heart that the contact day would come and prepared for it. It sounds like thats what you need to do. Either that or hold guilt, as you have already inferred you would.

HTH a bit at least

Message withdrawn

Hello
I have two birth children and one adopted child. My adopted daughter is only 3 and her birth mother feels unable to have contact with her, which saddens me. We talk about her and she is an unseen part of our lives even though DD does not fully understand her significance.

I feel very very strongly that it is a wonderful thing that your son wants to meet you. It sounds like he is brave, mature, curious and it would be a shame to turn him down. You can go slowly, with letters and counselling, but I believe it would be a good thing for both of you. You are intertwined even though you have not met since he was a baby.

i really do hope you get to meet him i really do its not his fault or yours, things like this must be so hard please for your and his sake meet him when the time is right ! if you don;t i think you will think about it all the time and it will affect him big time i,m sure tc

only read the op but if it was me i would agree to letters/emails first and then see how you feel.

Janni - would having contact with her birth mother not confuse things though? i have never heard of an adopted child having contact with their birth parents during their childhood - only once they reached 16/18.

Good luck, newname321, I think you've had some excellent advice on taking things gradually and I agree that for lots of reasons, you should let your 16 year old son meet you eventually.

Do you already have children? (as well as being pregnant). Sorry if you have mentioned this.

Are you worried that in some way, meeting this 16 year old son of yours will affect your relationship with your other children? Are you on trying to protect your other children from this perceived upheaval to their lives? Do you think your protective instinct is adding to your uncertaintly over the meeting?

Personally I think that if you choose to go through with a pregnancy and give birth to a child, then you have a life-long responsibility towards that child. Now if taking responsibility means that you give that child up to a life which you know that you cannot provide, that is of course fine, but I still think you should be answerable to that child, and that child should have the right to contact their birth parent in order to establish where they have come from. The child had no choice in the matter. He had no choice about being born, about being adopted, but he should have the choice about whether he wants to find out where he has come from.

You?ve had yearly updates, what has he had?

Tbh it sounds as if your son has had a great upbringing from parents who have clearly been honest with him from the outset. And who have also taken your own feelings into account by writing to you and telling you he wants contact with you. As this is a private adoption, there is nothing stopping his adoptive parents giving him your details and leaving it up to him to contact you himself.

There is no rule that says you have to have an overwhelming maternal instinct towards this child. You were only a child yourself when you had him, and it is therefore understandable that you might not feel about him the same way you feel about your own children. But this isn?t just about you. He is older now than you were then, and he has a right to know where he came from.

And I?m sorry to say this but this is also about your other children. They have a brother, and they have a right to know. Maybe not now while they are young, but when they get older they have a right to form a relationship with their sibling, if they all want that. And given that your son has your details now, he may well find his siblings in the future, and it will do far more damage if they find out elsewhere that they have a brother, than if you tell them and allow them to make the decision for themselves when they are old enough to comprehend.

wholeheartly agree with wannabe be honest with everyone and you new children as if you don,t it.ll come back in the future and will cause alot of upset please meet him and let him meet his family

Nappyaddict - it is standard procedure now in what they call 'open adoptions' that if it is deemed to be in the best interests of the child to have contact with one or both birth parents and/or members of the extended birth family, then it can happen. It is closely managed by post-adoption social workers, perhaps once or twice a year for a specified amount of time and always supervised. In between times there might be an exchange of letters/photos, also at prearranged times.

You have to remember that many many of the children adopted in this country will have quite strong memories of their birth parents and that although birth parents may not have the ability to raise their children, they can still love them and want the best for them. It can also help birth parents move on and make more of a success of their subsequent lives if they can see that their child/ren is thriving and has not forgotten them. My DD has so far had one direct contact with her birth father since she was adopted last year and it was very successful.

It might be easier for adoptive parents to cope with this if they already have birth children, I don't know. I know I was very surprised when I heard about it during our preparation course, but now it seems fine to me. Birth parents do not disappear just because the child does not see them and if some contact is possible, it enables the child to get a more complete picture of who they are and where they come from.

We also keep contact with our daughter's foster family, whom she adores and who adore her, so life can get a bit busy sometimes!!

FairladyRantalot makes a good point about looking at it all from his perspective.....the fact of the matter is that he never asked for any of this..... none of this is his fault.

Wannabe also makes a very good point about him knowing about the children you have now and vice versa.

I got pg when I was 14, and ds1 was born when I was 15.

I was obviously in a different situation to yours, but I went on to marry my dh and have 4 more dc.

Of course the circumstances around ds's birth made things very difficult, and I felt very differently through out that pg, than the subsequent ones.

I cannot imagine how much more difficult things would have been had I chosen to give him away

I guess the upshot of what I am trying to say is that , harsh as you may think I am, you cannot let him down. It is the only thing he has asked of you. I think you owe him that at least.

Good luck x

Ok. I am back, because it helped to get it all out last night and because I mostly received very good advice.

DH and I stayed up half the night talking. It was brilliant, he was so thoughtful and helpful. He has known about what happened for years but I have never talked about it in so much depth.

What I realised while we talked is that I am scared of making my son(!?) unhappy. This is based on two things. One is that I always wanted him to have a "normal" life and "normal" doesn't include having to face this stuff. But this stuff exists, he knows about it, so there is nothing I can do to stop him having to face it.

The second reason I am worried about hurting him is that I know he will ask about his biological father. The truth is hard for me to admit because I am ashamed of it. His dad was 32 when he got me (aged 14) pregnant. He was a charasmatic, handsome, nomadic eccentric and I fell for him hook, line and sinker. When I think how stupid and naive I was I shudder and I don't want my son (I need a better word, he is the son of the great couple who raised him, what should I refer to gim as???) to think badly of me when they know the truth. I also am scared he will try and contact his bio Dad if I give him details and the man should be avoided at all costs.

The other reason I am reluctant to have contact now is that I have a toddler and I am pregnant and I want to give my current family my all. I am scared of PND etc if I am dealing with this while getting used to a newborn. But while I still beleive my family come first that should not mean I can disregard everyone else.

So to conclude I have realised that I should respond to the contact positively. I have e-mailed his Dad and said I am happy to receive an e-mail. My first thought was to attach a letter and current photos but DH persuaded me to let him make the first contact and govern how much info he gets. I think DH is right. We will see when his e-mail arrives.

Newname, I did see this thread yesterday, but didn't know what to write, so left it.

I think you are right to be cautious, and you obviously do have lots of issues. I would highly recommend getting some expert help through an intermediary service - NORCAP are great. In the UK this sort of contact is more normally closely controlled by SS or counsellors and the like; it can result on very hurt people on both sides if it's not handled well.

As Expat mentioned I gave up a baby for adoption 19 yrs ago, but unlike you my lifetime dream is that he would choose to make contact with me, so in some ways I don't have so much in common with you.

newname, well done you have taken a brave step.

It's not quite the same but my boys are adopted, and at the time of placement I was keen to meet the birth parents. It was really important to me to just see the whites of their eyes so to speak, to get the slightest impression of the sort of people they were, get a feeling for the DS's background and roots. We didn't talk about anything of consequence, it was a very brief one off meeting with social workers present.

I don't mind if I never meet the BP's again but that short meeting made all the difference, like a missing piece of the jigsaw. His birth family are a part of him and nobody can take away that connection, even if we acknowledge it's part of his past rather than his present. I believe to be a whole person he'll need to come to terms with that.

Well, not quite the same but I hope it all works out OK and the counsellors can help you through it.

newname. I've changed my name for this. Your story strikes a cord with me. I will tell you my story and you can take it or leave it - I am not in your circumstances.

When I was 16 I became pregnant in circumstances I do not with to discuss here they are irrelevent. It was always my intention from the very beginning to have my baby adopted. Sadly my beautiul little girl was still born at 38 weeks. Like you I threw myself into my work - first A Levels, then escaping to university (wher I had a breakdown) then my career. Like you I never gave myself time to grieve or recover.

Everyday I wonder what my little girl would have been like and all I can say is that I wish, wish, WISH I knew that she was still out there somewhere and that that there was a chance that oneday a letter would turn up asking me to meet her.

If you can find it in your heart please meet your son now while you have the chance. You never know what is around the corner. Even if its only the once to satisfy his curiousity, I think you should agree. I think in some ways adoption is like a bereavement for the birth mum - you have the chance to meet him again grab it with both hands.

Sorry, I hope my story helps you put things in prespective of some sort but if you decide to ignore it I will understand - as I say our situations are different