It’s been raining for hours, and I’m stuck indoors. I’m not complaining, though. I get to lie in bed, wrap myself in a blanket, and stay there for as long as I want.
So, while sitting here scrolling through the news, I came across a story about a woman who put her child up for adoption immediately after giving birth. Years later, she traced the child to the family that adopted him and now wants her baby back.
The adoptive mother, however, has denied ever adopting a child and refuses to give the biological mother access to the boy. The biological mother has now taken the matter to court, asking that they reach an agreement that would allow her to be involved in her child’s life.
I was genuinely stumped when I read that the reason she gave the child up was because she wasn’t financially capable of taking care of him at the time. Apparently, she hoped that once she became financially stable, she would return and reclaim her child.
And I couldn’t help wondering where those thoughts were when she was handing over the child and signing the adoption documents? If her intention was always to come back for the child, then surely that should have been discussed before the adoption was finalized. But I suspect she knew that making such a condition might discourage anyone from adopting him in the first place.
What I find even more difficult to wrap my head around is the fact that this was not a few months or even a year later. It was nine years.
Imagine spending nine years raising a child, loving him, providing for him, watching him grow, and building a parent-child bond with him, only for his biological mother to suddenly appear and say, “Okay, I’m ready now. Give me my child,” and when you refuse, you get sued.
If I were the adoptive mother, I’d probably be wondering what the actual fack is going on.
I understand that biological parents can have complicated circumstances that force them to make incredibly painful decisions. Poverty can push people into choices they never imagined making but adoption is not supposed to be a temporary babysitting arrangement until the biological parent gets back on their feet. It is a permanent transfer of parental responsibility and, in most cases, legal rights.
This is also why I think people need to be extremely careful about the decisions they make when children are involved. You cannot make a life-changing decision today with the assumption that you can simply reverse it whenever your circumstances improve tomorrow. I find it interesting that we often hear stories of adopted children growing up and eventually searching for their biological parents. That is understandable. They may want to know where they came from, why they were given up, or simply reconnect with the person who gave birth to them.
But for the biological parent to come back nearly a decade later and try to reclaim a child who has already spent nine years believing someone else is their parent? That is a completely different situation.
At that point, there is a child caught in the middle, and his emotional attachment and stability should matter too. He isn’t a parcel that was temporarily left somewhere until his mother was ready to pick him up. Sometimes, doing what is best for a child means accepting that a decision you made years ago has consequences you can no longer undo.
