Dear Birth Mother

Being a woman in recovery, I understand how your issues with alcohol and drugs. I know how the bonds of chemicals hold you down, control you so you cannot feel what is inside you. I know alcohol is not a problem for the addict, it is a solution. I know illegal or prescription drug abuse were the next logical step for me as it has been for you. I know the chemicals cover a multitude of emotions, blocking the ability to feel and heal and deal with what is underneath the chaos.

I am a mother because you could not care for your children. Your chaos and chemical use pushed your children out of your life and into mine. I am so grateful for the lives you bore into existence. They are beautiful.

Yet I am angry with you for how you treated your/my/our children. Conflicted because I understand the prison of addiction, yet cannot understand how you continued to poison your/my/our children even after you knew, YOU KNEW, you were pregnant. You were taken into custody to preserve the lives of your/my/our children, yet you found a way out and continued to use. Again. Again. Again.

I want to tell you how your/my/our children suffer from fears of abandonment. How they scream at night against imagined or remembered fears. How they feel worthless, terrified, angry, rejected. How they've learned everyone makes promises but no one keeps them. How they were affected by therapy they should have received but did not, by medical procedures which should have been received but were not, by education intervention they were due but did not participate, by nutritional food which they should have received but was replaced by sugary and weak substitutes. How love for them is just a word you say to adults to make them happy.

I want to tell you how hard your/my/our children struggle in school. How we've spent hours and thousands of dollars on testing and evaluation. How we meet with teachers and therapists and counselors to help your/my/our children cope with having brains that cannot, will not function properly. How fetal alcohol spectrum/affect has made them different from their peers. How we weep for abuse done to them before they breathed real air. How this was not their fault, but they have the consequences just the same.

I want you to understand you were both a victim because of the abuse done to you before pregnancy was an option. I want you to admit you played in a serious game with unchangeable consequence. I want to stop hearing how you love them and miss them so much, because love from afar and without accountability is easy. Parenting with accountability is harder. Being a child who deserved to be loved and cherished from the start but was abused, neglected and abandoned again and again is by far the hardest.

You ask if you can see them again. I say not now. Not until you show an effort of recovery. (Remember, I am in recovery too so I will not fall for your attempts and disguises which are poorly hidden manipulations.) Not until I send you the letter which tells you the truth, mother to mother. Not until I can let go of this anger and can find forgiveness.