Melissa Nilsen lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two-year old daughter. She writes articles on open adoption and blogs about being a birthmother and mom. Check out her blog at: www.birthmomguide.blogspot.com

See Articles by Melissa at Tapestry Books on-line.

We live in an individualistic society. Our culture teaches us that we should be able to thrive by our own grit, our own merit. But are we meant to be so individualistic? We are pack people by nature; genetically designed to depend on a clan.

My birthdaughter’s mother helped me to glimpse the struggle that adoptive parents endure as they accept their inability to start a family on their own. There was a lot of anger and pain surrounding Sandy’s infertility. After three failed In Vitro Fertilization attempts, she and her husband commiserated over margaritas. I think her exact words were, “Great, now I’m going to have some teenage girl deciding if I’m a fit parent.”

Now we can laugh about how much she dreaded the person who turned out to be *me*. But in the months that she and Tom worked toward adoption, there was a lot of pain and anger stemming from her own feelings of inadequacy. Sandy felt that she should be able to produce children. She didn’t want to have to depend on me, a high school girl accidentally pregnant, to make her life feel complete.

Isn’t there terrible imbalance in the world when teenagers struggle to find solutions for their future—homes for children they cannot care for—while established, loving adults spend thousands of dollars, years of time, and endless amounts of emotional energy just to have one child?

But within this imbalance, is there also perhaps a lesson? We don’t travel in packs anymore. Somewhere along the evolutionary line, our clan-nature was fragmented. Perhaps in infertility there is hidden beauty among the ashes of tragedy. A reminder that sometimes we cannot do life alone.

A Birthmother Talks Frankly About Her Open Adoption

Image Credit: flickr