Complicated Grief

The most shocking part of being a birth mom is the experience of what feels like actual death occurring when you place your newborn baby with his new parents (see Choosing Pain as Love for the full account of this personal experience.) I was warned that the feeling would occur, but I didn’t entirely believe it was possible until I went through it myself. What has been consistent since then has been an unexpected and unfortunate result of how I cope: any death that holds some level of relevance to me crushes me in a new and very intense way. Compared to how I used to deal with death and the general idea of it, the experience of grieving my child while he is still alive created a new level of grief in other situations.

I experienced my first loss when my grandmother died. I was thirteen years old, and I was oddly wise for my age, able to accept that this was just how life was. Her life ended, and that is simply what happens to everyone. Immortality is nothing but an awesome concept for fiction. My aunt passing away from cancer impacted me in a different way, but I accepted the loss as inevitable. Every loss after that was a similar response. I had a knack for handling death well, with brief and infrequent periods of breakdowns to get me through, depending on the relationship I had with the individual.

After placing my birth son with a new family (who I must reiterate are the most incredible, compassionate humans I’ve ever known, and their son is lucky to have them) and experiencing the intensity of that death-like grief, it seemed to change something in my emotional core. It wasn’t long after my birth son’s arrival that I discovered one of my favorite actors had passed away (wands up always, Alan Rickman) and unexpectedly, the loss devastated me to my core. It felt as if I’d lost a family member. Of course I cherished him in multiple films, but the loss felt incredibly personal. I shed tears endlessly, where I had never had such a reaction before (besides Aaliyah, because she was my first real idol.) I’d always been accepting of the concept of death, but suddenly, it hurt too much.

It wasn’t long after the discovery of his death that I began losing friends to multiple causes of death. One passed away from an accidental shot to the head, another was lost to depression, and multiple others came up in the year of 2016. Each one slammed into me like a ton of bricks. What I didn't expect was that while grieving the loss of a friend/loved one, my grief of losing my birth son would return as well. At every point a loss occurs in my life that holds relevance to my heart in some fashion, I double my grieving by including the initial grief of losing the life I should have had with the child I gave birth to.

In the first year of my birth son's life, I would even text my his mother to ask for new photos each time a loss occurred (and it happened more than I care to say.)

She was kind and consistently sent several new photos with each request, but it never calmed the pain very long. The temporary relief was helpful, though, because the child I grieved as if death had taken him from me could be proven to be alive anytime I wanted. That security was the smallest bit of positive power I could hold onto.

My healing in the pains of being a birth mother have progressed over time. I no longer request photos each time a death occurs, thanks largely to the healing I’ve done over the years, but the doubled grief has never ceased. It is a burden I wasn’t expecting to have, but I will never regret asking for it.

My birth son is now five years old, and every death I continue to experience since his birth repeatedly feels as though it is ripping my soul apart. I confess that the pain is overwhelming and, often, seems to change the depth of who I am due to feeling consumed by nothing but agony. However, as I mentioned in the full story of becoming a birth mother, I chose this pain as love for my birth son. He’s too perfect to not experience the life he has, and there are no regrets in choosing this life for him. Come what may for me, he will always matter more.

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