Guest Blogger: it has affected my marriage

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forgive us for not posting the past couple days. birthMOM and I were conferencing it up and busy busy!! 

My name is Katelyn.  

I'm a birth mother to Ally (4 1/2 born in May of 2007)

I am the adoptive mother to Cayden (4 1/2 born in April of 2007) 

and biological mother to Jaxson (7 months born in March of 2011)

I met my husband Daniel in April of 2009 

(just after Cayden's second birthday)

Isn't he a stud!  Yes I know!

  One of the first memories Daniel has of me is Mothers day 2009.  

Mother's Day has been hard for me since I placed mainly because I was in the hospital with Ally on Mother's day.  I was still sort of her mother on that day.  I say sort of because I had signed papers the day before (yes on birth mother's day) so legally I wasn't her mother anymore.  The first Mother's day that Daniel and I were together he realized the full force of the emotions that a birth mother deals with.  I don't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing but hey... he married me even knowing I'm slightly emotional sometimes (he just read this over my shoulder and laughed because I said 'sometimes').  I think it may have prepared him for what was to come.  However I don't know that it really ever could have.

Jessa asked me to blog about how being a birth mother has affected my marriage.  Honestly I can say that it hasn't been a big issue.  Daniel learned early that I need to cry.  I need to get things out and there isn't anything he can do to fix it.  Once he realized that, he would take the kids and go somewhere while I cried.  SO I called in a few favors. haha!

First off I think it's unrealistic to think that being a birth mother won't affect your relationships/marriage.  Regardless of how open or closed your adoption is there is a certain level of emotions that come from placing a child for adoption.  After talking with a few birth mothers I got some responses that were astounding to be honest.

One birth mother stated that...

"The adoption and my 'past' has been a stressor on my marriage. My husband hated seeing that I was still holding onto this little man and all he could think of was that I had sex with another dude"

"We were talking one day and he said he can't make me regret something in my past. Then he's said he'd never be able to place a baby."

I think this is actually the most common thing I've heard....

"If I am upset or stressed, my husband feels responsible for making me feel better. It's taken him a long time to realize that sometimes I don't need him to make it better, I just need to work through it"

So how do we better communicate with our husbands to let them know how to help us?  

I think the biggest thing is to know for ourselves as birth mothers what we need.  

One birth mother may be like me and need time alone to cry, vent, deal with things.  While another may need her husband to hold her, talk to her, reassure her.  It may take some trial and error in this department.  Another idea is to talk with your support person.  Does everyone have one of those or just me?  I hope you all do.  A support person is someone that you trusted during your pregnancy and placement.  Someone that you could confide in and they would reassure you of your decisions.  I think something else that helped me and Daniel out was honesty from the beginning.  I was very up front with him about the adoption.  I made sure he understood that while I knew the decision I made was right, that didn't make it less hard.  I would still have times where I didn't know how to add my husband into my adoption story.  The transition wasn't the easiest but it was worth it.  I can openly talk to him about it now.  I have on occasion told him "Go read my blog before you talk to me today."  It has helped.  There are some things that words can express -for me writing them gets it all out.  

I hope this helps.  I hope you feel less alone after reading this.  I hope you understand that there are going to bumps in the road but it's worth working through.  It's worth overcoming.   

Me and My husband on our Wedding day (8/27/2009)