This guest post is by Coley Strickland, a birthmother and co-founder of Birthmom Buds.
I wear many hats in life: daughter, sister, friend, etc. Two of the most important hats I wear are Mother and Birthmother. They may sound similar but they are very different.
As a Mother, I’m with my son, Noah, nearly every single day. The days apart are few and far between.
I can tell you the first time he got an ear infection, the first time he slept through the night, what he wore on his first birthday, how long I cried after he went to Kindergarten and other random things that are etched into my memory as his Mother.
I can just about sense when something is off with him. I can remember the instance he first said my name and how my heart swelled with pride so much that I thought it might burst at that very moment.
As a Birthmother, I spent three days and nights in the hospital with my (birth)son, Charlie, and then I got in a car and went left and he got in a car with his adoptive parents and went right. The days we spend together via visits are few and far between.
The random things I know about Charlie have been relayed to me via his Mom on the phone and are penned into tear stained pages of my journal. I’ll never forget how my heart felt the first time I heard him call her Mom; I thought it was going to break.
While the differences are big, the similarities are big too.
First and foremost, I am their Mother. Maybe I’m not the one doing the mothering of Charlie, but the fact that I was his first mother, carried him, mothered him in the womb, and gave life to him are sacred to me and that can never be taken away from me.
My love for my boys is the same and it is unconditional. While both pregnancies were unplanned, the moment I found out about each of them I wanted them and fell in love with each of them and the moment I held them, I knew I would die for them.
That is the love of a Mother.
Coley Strickland is a mother and birthmother who lives in the South. She is the co-founder and director of BirthMom Buds, a website and organization providing support to birthmothers and pregnant women considering adoption.
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