I would NEVER do THAT

I feel like there are a million adoption stories told from the child's point of view, but very few from the parent. I happen to be a parent who gave their children up for adoption and I want to tell my story.

Once upon a time, I heard about a woman who gave her children up. These were not babies. These kids were older (not that that matters), and I thought to myself I would NEVER do THAT. How could any (real) Mother do THAT?

Of course at that time I had a "perfect life". I had married my high school sweetheart and we had 3 healthy, happy children together. Sure we struggled with bills from time to time, but mostly we were happy. Until we weren't.

It didn't happen overnight. It kind of snuck up on us. My husband became distant and we started arguing more. I was busy with work, school and kids, so I didn't notice the shift at first. There were signs, I'm sure of it, but I missed all of them for several years.

When I finally realized that he was cheating, I was devastated. I had been blind to the truth for so long that when I finally did start to see, I didn't want to believe. I also couldn't prove it, which made it easy for him to gaslight me and claim that I was just imagining things. That went on for a couple of years until I finally gave him an ultimatum.

I still had NO PROOF that he was indeed cheating, but my gut said otherwise. He never had a job for more than three months, so he could not use work as an excuse to get away, but he still managed. I admit I made it easy for him. I never questioned him about where he really was until after our third child was born. And even then it took him blatantly staying out all night for me to finally start questioning.

When I started questioning things, I realized he had probably been at it some time, as I made it so easy for him to get away. I called it trust. He saw it as a blank check to have affairs left and right.

We finally split when our oldest was six. I did not know it at the time, but he had left me with one final gift. I got pregnant with baby number four (oops) somewhere around two weeks before I packed up myself and my kids and moved out.

When I left him, I had to also leave my job as I would have no transportation since the car was in his name and he wasn't sharing. I moved in with my grandmother and gave birth to my fourth as a single mother who had no job and no car. Things may have turned out differently if I had been able to get those things, but my grandmother lived far from town and without a car, or the money to pay for a ride from friends or family, I was stuck. I couldn't afford to stay, nor could I afford to go.

My ex pretty much just ghosted us. When I needed diapers or shoes for the kids, I had to call his mother and ask her to make him buy them. Half of the time, she was the one to buy whatever I needed, and most of the time she had to insist that he actually take the time out of his jobless day to bring me the items requested. We decided that he would have the kids every weekend, but he rarely showed up to take them, and if I was able to drop them off at his mother's where he lived, he would leave them with her for the entire weekend.

Our last family picture was taken a week after our youngest was born. I insisted that my ex be in it. Not for my sake, but for my son's. I wanted him to have ONE picture with his whole family, even though his parents split up before he was born, I wanted him to at least have that.

I stayed with my grandmother for the better part of a year. But when it was clear that I was not going to be able to get back on my feet from her house, I started looking for someone else who was willing to take in me and my four kids. Without a job, all I could offer was food stamps, and I needed either a car to use, or to live close enough to town to walk to a potential job. I also needed a free sitter for while I was out job hunting, and a free or very low cost sitter once I'd found work. I also needed whoever took me in to buy diapers and wipes and everything that wasn't food for me and my kids. That was no small order.

I only had food stamps because my ex and I had exhausted our ability to receive cash welfare payments in our time together (in my state, you are cut off for life after five years). We had been together almost ten years and had relied on welfare off and on, eventually maxing out by the time we separated. When I left, I applied for child support, but my ex was on SSI, and SSI is the one form of income that child support cannot be taken from. According to the law my ex owed nothing in child support, and I had used all of the welfare I was allowed to use in my LIFETIME already, so the state also gave me nothing. The only thing I could get were food stamps. I received somewhere around five hundred dollars in stamps a month.

Eventually, my father offered to take us in. He knew my situation and said he would help. He said I could use his truck to look for work and to get to and from once I'd gotten a job. I had not grown up with my father and hadn't even met him until I was fifteen, so we were not particularly close, but he had been very involved with my kids lives so I decided to move. I waited until school was out for the year, then packed us up again.

When I lived with my grandmother, we were twenty minutes from my ex. When I moved in with my father, we were suddenly an hour and a half drive, one way. That summer, my ex visited two or three times. He never asked if he could take the kids and what support his mother was able to force out of him dried up when we moved. He also moved his girlfriend into his mother's house the day after we moved and he proceeded to move on with his life.

Living with my father was not easy. He had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer and his girlfriend was a drug addict. At first, we lived in his two bedroom house with them, but after a month or so, we moved into a trailer he had recently purchased and had hauled to his property. Things should have started looking up, but there were setbacks. One was that I could only look for work if my father had gas in his truck and didn't have a doctor's appointment to be at. Another was that I was uncomfortable with leaving my children with him and his girlfriend for extended periods of time, so I ended up not having as many opportunities to look for work as I had envisioned.

I applied at the one business within walking distance, and every restaurant and grocery store within ten miles of my home. I had many interviews, but no job offers. Maybe it was because I was upfront about being a single mom, of four kids no less. Maybe it was because I didn't interview well. Whatever the reason, a steady job did not come. So when the county fair rolled into town, I signed up. I worked seven days and received somewhere around two hundred dollars for my time. That was the only job I had found and it ended up paying pennies.

At that point, we had been at my father's for three months and I started to break down. I had been applying all over town with no luck, and the temporary work I had gotten, only lasted one week and left me woefully underpaid. In the next month I slid further into depression. I was out of options and couldn't see a way out.

You may be asking, why not send the kids to their father? Well, as I already stated, he was living with his mother, but his sister, her boyfriend, and her two kids also lived there and they were not clean. His mother worked most of her life and raised three kids by herself. She would work all day, then come home to a dirty house, which she would do her best to clean, but her kids never helped. It got very bad after his sister started having her own kids. She routinely left dirty diapers everywhere and would wait to change their diaper until it was completely soaked through with urine. She left trash and food on the floors, which meant that they of course also had roaches and mice.

It wasn't that I didn't want their dad to have them. I could not allow my children to live in filth and be neglected, so he was a non-option. I got so depressed that I started contemplating suicide. At that point I knew that I needed help. I eventually asked my ex to come stay at my house and watch our kids so I could go into the hospital and get emergency intervention for my depression because I was that far gone. I was in a full blown mental breakdown and couldn't leave my kids with my father for upwards of a week, nor did I want them moving in with their father for even that short amount of time.

He refused. Not only did he refuse, he said that I was just jealous of his new relationship and was being dramatic. He said that I just wanted him to come up and that when he got there that I would not go to the hospital like I said I wanted to. He did offer at that point to take the kids, but school was again in session and I did not want my two school aged kids to miss a week or more of school. He saw that as just an excuse. So after a couple of weeks of begging, I gave him another ultimatum. Come stay with your kids, or I call Children's Services to take custody as I simply could not do it any longer. My will to live was gone, and the only thing keeping me going was my will to provide for my children, but that was also fading, and it was fading fast.

He still blew me off. So I called. I only intended for them to be in temporary placement, but things went out of control very fast. Three days into my five day stay, my father showed up at the hospital. He was angry to say the least and had come to drop off my clothes and tell me I was not to come back to the property. He wouldn't tell me why.

So I was homeless when I was discharged. I ended up going to a shelter and when the permanency hearing rolled around, I was not in a position to regain immediate custody of my kids. My ex was likewise not granted custody as his home was filthy (why no one cared that his sister's kids lived there is beyond me, but to this day, she has her kids). My kids were officially placed in a more permanent form of foster care and my struggle to regain custody ensued.

I will admit that I spiraled fast and hard. I tried to kill myself in earnest and ended up being committed by my doctor to a long term care facility. I started self-mutilating. I hated myself SO MUCH. I had done the one thing I swore as a mother, I would never do. But I worked my butt off and got out of the facility some eight months after I was first admitted.

It was now time to get my kids back. Step one was secure housing. My little sister's boyfriend was a slumlord who agreed to "help" me and put me in one of his houses. It was a three bedroom. Housing acquired you say? Nope. My slumlord in-law-to-be had ripped a closet out and left the drain pipe from the upstairs bathroom exposed and that, along with the small whole in the floor where it went to the basement made the whole house unsuitable for my kids. The reasoning I was given was that my youngest (at this time, a toddler) could somehow get his foot stuck in the hole. I cannot stress how small this hole was. The pipe that ran down the wall was a two or three inch pipe, and the hole in my floor was a square that was just wider than the diameter of the pipe. THAT hole made my home unsafe.

Then when I finally got a job, the argument was that I would have to work too many hours and would never be home. I got into a relationship with a man who had had Children's Services called on him and his ex some twenty years before I met him. There was a very short investigation and he and his ex were actually cleared of any wrongdoing, but somehow, just the fact that there had been a complaint about him, I was told I could not date him if I wanted my children back.

They also took issue with my medication. I was on several and I developed narcolepsy. I actually fell asleep during a custody hearing because of it. So, as long as I was in medications, I was not fit to have my kids. BUT, I was forbidden from stopping any of my meds, per family court.

When my children had been in foster care for eighteen months, the state filed to strip both myself and my ex of custody. That started the last six months of my fight. The reasoning was that neither of us had made any progress in securing a safe and appropriate home for our children and were therefore not trying hard enough.

Long story made even longer, I fought my hardest, but could not overcome the state's case. They determined where the goal posts were and if I thought I'd reached one, they would nudge it back until it was just out of reach. The state's case on the surface was very compelling. They made both of us out to be careless monsters and in the end, they won.

The day I signed my rights away, I did it to take back some of the narrative. If my children looked into it some day, they would not see the terrible allegations leveled against me. All they would see was that I gave them up voluntarily. I figured, some day, I could explain.

I loved my children, but love wasn't enough. I wanted my children, but wanting wasn't enough. I had been a great mother to them for seven years, but what I had been, was not good enough. As far as the state saw it, I was not fit and nothing I could do would change their opinion, so in the end, I put my children up for adoption.