Stuck in grief or just passing through?

Many of us can rattle off the phases of grief from memory: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, acceptance. With grief, there’s an understanding that we’ll move through it – it may never go away, but it will lessen with time, and we’ll do a steady march from one stage to the next with a few expected backtracks here and there.

That’s assuming that everything is in place to allow that grief to be expressed. With grief and adoption, that's not always the case. In the book Disenfranchised Grief, Kenneth Doka describes the aspects that are needed to allow a person to move forward with grief: The grief must be openly acknowledged, socially accepted, and publically mourned.

When any of these is missing (“disenfranchised grief”), a person can get “stuck” or “stalled” in their grief process. For birthparents, it’s no wonder that grief can drag on for years and years. Most women I know who relinquished did so because they weren’t in an environment that was supportive during their pregnancy or shortly after the baby was born. It’s no surprise then that the grief was very private. Limited support before giving birth = limited support afterward. Many women were told they’d get over it, they should move on, etc. which adds a sense of shame about the feelings of grief that linger.

I don’t want to paint too dismal of a picture for birthparents or proclaim that it’s impossible to get over it, so why bother trying. But I do want to call attention to the fact that there have been pieces solidly identified that can help grief move – and even if those pieces weren’t there at the time of relinquishment, it’s not too late to go back and set them in place if we’re feeling stuck.

The first step for many of us is to come out of the birthparent closet. If we want support, we have to let people know what it is we need them to help us through. When you first start allowing yourself to talk about it, it may feel somewhat confessional. You may find yourself whispering behind your hand, or unable to make eye contact. Try anyway.

Getting our grief to be socially accepted is a little trickier. We can’t control the way society reacts to adoption. Once we’re more comfortable talking about it we can educate and advocate, but there will still be underlying judgments from other people – and from ourselves – and as much as we may want to punch someone in the teeth for saying something insensitive, we have to try our darndest to cultivate a thick skin and the awareness that most people just haven’t given adoption a lot of thought.

As for publically mourning the child you relinquished, this can be a big stallout in the grief process. How do you have a sense of finality when the person you’re mourning is still alive? This is where ritual comes in. You can create your own and ask friends to support you, or you can keep your ritual private but later discuss it with people you're close to. There’s something to be said for allowing other people to see your grief and hold space for you. In some cities, on the day before Mother’s Day, birthmothers gather for a Birthmother’s Day ceremony. We did this in May here in Seattle, and to be able to publically remember, grieve, and send blessings to our children was powerful.

Our friends won’t necessarily know what grief we're experiencing, and they can’t be expected to initiate any of these processes to help us move through grief. But to take ownership of our own process can be a huge step toward regaining our sense of empowerment.

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