Protected: “Sorry, Mrs. Smith” — Looking Beyond The Story

October 3, 2009

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Protected: “Sorry, Mrs. Smith, your baby has to be adopted”

September 23, 2009

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Open Records: Congratulations to Ontario!

June 3, 2009

Congratulations to all Ontario residents who have lost family members to adoption: Adoption records opened in your province on June 1st!

But deep sympathy for those who are affected by vetoes that prevent them from obtaining the records that belong to them. Vetoes are based on fear and denial. I am not saying this in a derogatory way at all as I work in the mental health field, but vetoes are invariably filed by people who — instead of filing a veto — should actually see a counsellor, perhaps with family members, to help them deal with the issues that are causing them to feel they need “protecting” from other family members.

Adoptees often file vetoes to “protect” the people who adopted them from feeling “threatened.” A family counsellor could help the adoptive family to get over these feelings and fear and embrace the reunion experience. A registered clinical counsellor or family therapist could enable the adoptive parents to learn that the sales-pitch they were given by the adoption agency, of being “the only parents,” is not only impossible to guarantee, but also in most cases a fabrication (e.g., the original mother did NOT willingly abandon her baby and her motherhood and still feels love for her lost child, mother and child are still connected by a deep blood-bond and genealogy), and is false advertising of a promise that the adoptee has NO obligation to try to fulfill.

Natural parents can enlist the aid of of a family counsellor or marriage counsellor to help them break the news to a husband, wife, or children, that they have another son or daughter out there. This information will NOT destroy a marriage. But we as natural mothers were told that NO man would marry us if he found out about our “shame” (I was even told repeatedly by my mother that no man would marry a non-virgin!). After all, that is why our parents and the pressure of society incarcerated us into maternity “homes” — to hide our pregnancy from society and release us again as “born again virgins.” I know myself how hard it is to tell. My three younger children were only told about their eldest sibling about 5 months into our reunion — it took me that long to get the courage, and I still expected the worst. Our families rejected us when we got pregnant out of wedlock — so of course we expect the same reaction from our present families. But this fear is unfounded.

BUT did you know that natural mothers were NEVER promised confidentiality? The social workers, maternity prisons, and those who had power over us not only knew while they were stripping us of our rights to our child and many of our human rights, that not only did the adoptive parents receive copies of our records including our and our child’s full names, but also that records were NOT sealed upon the surrender of the child but upon the legal adoption court order being granted to the adoptive parents! The purpose of sealed records was NOT to protect us, but to protect the adoptive family *from* us. So do not let anyone lie to you about “birthmother confidentiality.” It is truly a myth.

“Secrecy in adoption probably has its roots in a desire to protect the child from interference from the biological parents and to hide the often illegitimate circumstances of the child’s origins.” – Ministry of Community and Social Services Report by the Committee on Record Disclosure to Adoptees (1976)

I admit, I have heard of one natural mother who was in favour of closed records. But the reason why was that she had also adopted and did not want her adopted children to find out that she was “on par with” their lowly slutty incubators (as she saw their natural parents as being). This is not the type of woman who needs protecting. What she needs is therapy.

So, good for you, Ontario, for opening your records. Next task: to eliminate the veto provisions.

“The legal system ordinarily makes no attempt to write out of existence, by sealing records or other such mechanisms, the various parental figures who walk out of their children’s lives, such as the divorced parent who relinquishes custody. It is only in regulating adoptive family — families formed in the absence of any blood link – that the government feels that it has to seal records as to figuratively destroy the existance of the famiy that is linked by blood.” (Yngvasson, p. 44).

As an addition, as with all my posts, I invite your feedback. If you have an interesting story or point of view regarding vetoes, please comment.

More information: Origins Canada page on Open Records In Ontario

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Why adoption is how it is

March 11, 2009

Child adoption, as it currently exists in Western law, was first created in an 1851 statute in the state of Massachusetts to deal primarily with the social welfare problem of poverty and “unwanted and unloved children.” At the time, social welfare reformists were looking for a solution to the problem of poverty: work-houses, orphans on the street who were in danger of exploitation, and rapid population growth in-part due to birth control prohibitions and legalized marital rape.

“Its illegitimate origins, its birth in the workhouse, so to speak, has been another adoption secret and is usually omitted from official genealogies of adoption” (O’ Shaughnessy, pp. 68-69).

Child adoption was considered a “progressive” social policy at the time, and other states and countries (the U.K., Australia, Canada, etc.) soon passed their own similar laws. By the 1930s, almost every Western jurisdiction had some form of adoption law.

That child adoption is a modern invention is often a surprise to people who believe that it has existed since time immemorial. The fact, however, is that it was relatively rare and legally limited throughout history, and while it has been common practice throughout history for children to be fostered, legal adoption in most nations and situations was usually reserved for adult males to adopt other adult males for inheritance purposes.

As opposed to fostering or legal guardianship, adoption involves a complete legal severing of all legally recognized family relationships (“filiation”), inheritance rights, and parental rights. Before the 20th century, with high child mortality rates being the norm worldwide, adopting an adult to be a legal heir was a much surer bet.

One example of this distinction between fostering and adoption is the case of Moses in Jewish and Christian religious tradition, for whom a strong argument can be made that he was fostered, not adopted. At no time were his birth records changed to indicate that an Egyptian princess was the mother who had given birth to him, nor were his legal ties and legal family relationship with his Hebrew family severed. Aaron remained recognized as his brother, and Jochebed as his mother..

There was also little demand for adoption prior to WWII, as the historical norm up until the 20th century was for women to marry in their middle to late teens and began their reproductive careers long before the progressive and inevitable decline in fertility due to age. Thus, the late 20th century “infertility epidemic” did not exist.

Adoption laws since then have not changed significantly since they began a century and a half ago, other than to close and seal original birth records in most jurisdictions and issue new official birth records falsely stating that the adoptive parents gave birth to the child (beginning in the 1920s and going onwards). Other minor changes have included gradual elimination of inheritance rights from natural parents, modifications to the legal process of surrender, and a few jurisdictions that have re-opened their records again under highly restrictive circumstances. None of these changes affected or questioned the underlying assumptions on which adoption was founded.

But adoption as a legal and social institute assumes that the child is unloved and unwanted, or that the parent is devastatingly unfit. That’s the social problem adoption was created to address. No matter how one fancies it up, this is the reason behind it. Find a home for an unloved and unwanted child.

And adoption would likely have stayed this way except that after WWII, the interest in adopting newborns grew. In part because the emergence of social work as a profession defined unwed mothers as neurotics who could be “cured” with separation from their babies, and defined the unhappiness and “empty homes” of childless couples as an equally important social problem to address. Add to this mix the rise of J. B. Watson’s behaviorist psychology (“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select … regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.“) which left the former universal belief in “bad blood” in the dust, and a market demand for newborns emerged.

And on it went. But adoption laws still assume that the mother and father do not love or want their baby. Read almost any state or provincial adoption statute and it is evident that the law is built upon the assumption of complete legal and emotional cut-off from the original family. The complete absence of the natural family from legal statutes after the surrender has taken place reflects the assumption that this family has no continuing interest in the welfare of their lost child. The loving mother’s interest in the continuing welfare of her child, her love for her child, and the mother-child bond forged during nine months in the womb, are all assumed to not exist.

And, tragically, moms who love and want their babies, and assume that a continuing connection will be guaranteed through open adoption (as the industry began to promised them as it worked to persuade more moms to hand over their babies), get caught in the middle. Those who buy the promotional hype that “Adoption is the Loving Option” and surrender their babies on this assumption find out the hard way to their surprise that they are suddenly judged by both the law and by society to be “heartless abandoners,“as one adoptee so eloquently put it.

Is it any wonder that many (most?) adoptees feel abandoned and/or rejected on some level?

One hundred and fifty seven years of continuity in adoption law is not going to change any time soon. Especially because the underlying legal principle that adoption was founded on (child abandonment) is never questioned by politicians or society in general. And especially as adoption is now used by child protection departments to “save” children from parents who have been judged unfit and abusive in a court of law.

It is a tragedy that we who are natural mothers of adopted children got caught in this trap, of believing what we were told by adoption industry workers: that adoption was what it wasn’t (loving) and would provide what it legally can’t guarantee (a lifetime of happiness for our child and a continuing connection with us). We were sold a bill of goods. Adoption was created to provide homes for “children with no parents,” abandoned children, and unwanted children. In essence, it is a form of legalized abandonment. No matter how you dress it up, this fact will always remain.

But if you are an 18 year old mother, lying there in your hospital bed with your precious and much-loved baby in your arms, the facilitator and the “waiting parents” standing there wanting you to hurry up and sign the papers, has anyone told you any of this? You are but one signature away from signing into a system that assumes your baby is unloved, unwanted, and to being willingly abandoned into another family’s hands.

Recommended Reading:

  • Brace, Charles Loring. (1872). “The Life of the Street Rat,s” an excerpt from The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them.
  • O’ Shaughnessy, T. (1999). Adoption, Social Work and Social Theory : Making the Connections. Ashgate Publishing, Limited, ISBN 1-85628-883-8.
  • Practice Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. (Nov. 2006). “Aging and Infertility.” Fertility and Sterility, Vol 86, Supplement 4.
  • Samuels, Elizabeth J. (2001). “The Idea of Adoption: An Inquiry Into the History of Adult Adoptee Access to Birth Records” Rutgers Law Review #367.
  • Solinger, R. (2000). Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade. New York: Routledge. ISBN: 0-41592-676-9.

Copyright 2009 Cedar Bradley. All rights reserved.

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February 20, 1980

February 21, 2009

… a seventeen year old with no-one to talk to and no-one who would listen to me.

… parents are 62 and 61 years old … small town Prairie mentality and Fundamentalist beliefs.

… internment in a wage home once I began “showing,” hiding my growing belly to protect my parents from the shame of “what would the neighbours and relatives say?”

… being shamed by my parents into wearing my grandma’s wedding ring to hide my shameful “unwed” status from the world.

… a week of false labour.

… my parents dropping me off at the hospital slightly past midnight, and the nurses telling them to leave. Being put on a gurney and given a sleeping pill to sleep, then put into a closet for the night. Lights on. The pain was strong and the sleeping pill did nothing for me. Awake all night. Alone.

… strapped down to a bed with a fetal monitor wrapped around my stomach. Another one screwed into his scalp.

… my mother coming in the afternoon to sit with me, acting ashamed, never showing concern or affection.

… screaming in pain … and being told by nurses to shut up.

… nauseated and disoriented from the straight Demerol injections that did nothing for the pain

… a doctor telling the intern that he had given me too much Demerol.

… 18 hours of labour with no food or water

… wheeled down the hallway

… climbing  onto the narrow delivery table,  as flat as an ironing board, my arms strapped down with leather straps, feet up in stirrups.

… trying to push out a baby  against gravity, not having slept for 36 hours … not having eaten for 24 hours … overwhelming pain.

… episiotomy sliced down with a deep 4-inch-long cut, without anaesthesia … sewn up again without adequate anaesthesia.  Permanent nerve damage.

… sheet put up in front of my face to prevent me from seeing him as he was born and whisked from the room, abducted.

… given a shot and waking up 18 hours later in a ward far far from the maternity ward and nursery, other end of the hospital, different floor.

… a huge huge sense of loss.

… my breasts bound up to prevent lactation.

… unable to walk for 2 days after.

… not allowed to see or hold my baby. Never being told I had the right to. No lawyers to explain to me that i had *any* rights at all. No nurse brought him to me

… finally allowed to look at him for about 5 minutes  in the nursery several days later, watched over by hawk-like nurses to prevent me from picking him up. I was not welcome there.  Seeing him confirmed for me what I already knew: that I loved him beyond all measure. I wanted to keep him.

….  a woman who had surrendered a baby 2 months prior being sent in to convince me to “do the right thing.”

… forbidden by parents from taking my baby home.

… never told about welfare or any other way to keep him.  At age 17 from a small farming town and a sheltered upbringing, I had no idea even what ‘welfare’ was.

… the social wrecker telling  me to sign or he’d be in foster care until I ‘decided’ to. Telling me that the children of unwed mothers grow up to be criminals.  Lying to me that I would “move on.” No informed consent, no other options, no choice.

I wanted to keep my baby. I was capable. I was never given the chance or the choice.

This is adoption. This was coercion.  I was nothing more than a convenient uterus to them, to take away another baby for adoption.This was done to thousands of unwed mothers across Canada for thirty years, until about 1988. There is nothing “voluntary” about “voluntary surrender.” A coerced “decision” is not a decision at all.

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This is what it’s like.

January 6, 2009

This is from “Kathy’s Story” on the Exiled Mothers site. Read this and remember. If you have a child of your own, think about how much you love that child and have always loved that child, then picture that child ripped from your arms or your body and taken away against your will:

” … they had my arms tied to the side straps, as well as my legs were tied too. I couldn’t move. I remembered screaming at this point again, “I want to hold my baby” “Please help me.” They laid him down in the plastic see-through bassinet, and the doctor yelled out to the nurse, give me 100 cc’s of Demerol. Again, screaming along with my son, they injected the shot. This is still like it happened yesterday, I can remember every minute. This is post traumatic stress. I saw the nurse whip him up, and speedily run out of the room. My doctor’s words were: “Kathy, this is what’s best for you, it’s too hard for you to see your baby”. Within seconds I was out like a light.. I remembered waking up in the hallway, the next morning, next to the nurses station. I remembered waking up so frightened and scared to death. I felt like I was raped. Raped from life. Raped from my rights as a patient.”

This is what it was like. I know.

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Adopting-Back My Son

October 4, 2008

This is the first time i have “come out” about this on-line. Last summer, one year ago in 2007, i adopted-back the son who was stolen at birth for adoption from me when I was 17.

I say ‘stolen’ because the coercion that was used on me left me with no choice at all but to surrender him — it is not a “choice” or a “decision” if there is only one viable option given or allowed. To say i “placed” him denies the reality that keeping him was NOT an option I was given and thus there was NO choice. I loved him, I wanted to keep him, and i never wanted to lose him. I was NOT unfit! But unwed mothers where i lived, in 1980, had babies removed at birth by hospital staff if they were unwed minors with no family support for keeping their babies (I have plenty of testimony from other mothers that it was done to them as well). It was truly a form of rape — just as traumatic.

Looking back, I felt so powerless at the time, so much without choice, that I had no way of fighting what they were doing to me. Plus I was entirely naive. I had no idea that nurses taking and withholding my baby from me was not what was done to all mothers. It was only when I “woke up” from the medicine-induced fog I was in, several days later, that I realized they had not brought my baby to me, and that this was not right. I was allowed to see him (but not touch) for about 5 minutes, under the gaze of hawk-like nurses (but I found out much later that they then moved him to another hospital to prevent me from finding him — he told me he had been picked up from the Jubilee, when I had given birth in St. Joseph’s). And I now now first-hand that only when a mother has given birth, has fully recovered from birth without her baby being taken from her or coercion being applied, can she make any decision about adoption.

My 62-yr-old Fundamentalist parents made it clear that they considered it rightful punishment for the sin of fornication, and the social worker had a waiting list of clients she was under pressure to provide babies for — i was forced to sign papers in her office under blackmail that unless i did, my baby would be indefinitely held in foster care. I was not told about welfare or any other resources and my abusive parents (they would use the belt on me if i so much as “talked back” to them) made it clear that i was not allowed to bring my baby home.

After 19 years of searching, i found my son again, and we hugged for the first time one day before his 20th birthday.  It was the first time I was allowed to touch him.

His adoptive parents first told him that they supported our reunion — but he found out as time went on that their view was that “reunion” meant a one-time or limited-time event, that his curiosity would be satisfied and he would say “thanks and bye” to me. Their attempts to control him, to force him to end contact with me, escalated into abuse — culminating in 4 hours of confinement and torture (his words) one night when he was 21 yrs old. He eventually left their house one New Years Day on the advice of the Victim Services units of two police departments.  He was so traumatized by this that he could not speak at all until one year later.

We began talking about me adopting him back. After several years of discussion, and after the complete breakdown and ending of the relationship between him and the people who raised him, we decided to go ahead with it.

So we did it. And we have not looked back. It is a dream come true for both of us.

Reunion can go places beyond what one first expects. It can restore a family which has been involutarily torn apart.

But separated families reuniting again shows that the bond between mother and child can endure past the worst of separations. And it also proves that anyone who is promised by an agency or other adoption business that adopting an infant will provide them with a “life-time guarantee” of “a child of their own” should sue their broker for making false promises. No-one can make promises on behalf of another human being, especially an infant who cannot speak for themselves.

But the best thing of all is that we are back together again, and both of us have reclaimed what was taken from us

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Open Adoption: They knew it would work.

August 21, 2008

Open adoption is the norm these days, contrasting with the closed adoptions of the Baby Scoop Era, which may have ended in the mid-1970s in the United States but continued far longer in Canada. I knew single moms in the mid-1980s whose babies were still being taken at birth with the mother not being allowed to see or touch her baby. It was done to me in fact in 1980.

So, why did open adoption begin? Frankly, it began because mothers had begun keeping their babies, finding parental support and access to financial assistance that did not exist in the Baby Scoop Era when shamed parents shipped their daughters off to maternity facilities and “wage home” to return as “born again virgins.” Agencies faced the prospect of going out of business unless they found a new way to persuade moms to surrender their newborns. Research was done, and open adoption was found to be the key.

Examples are below, but the data is far more extensive and other articles examine the exact statistical affect of various open adoption practices such as meeting prospective adopters before the birth vs. after the birth, the baby going home with them from the hospital, pre-birth consents signed, etc.

This raises a huge ethical issue that is not being discussed in adoption literature. If a mother’s decision about surrendering her baby is being influenced by practices carefully researched and applied to increase the odds she will surrender increase, is it really a freely-made decision at all? Especially if she is kept unaware of this manipulation? In effect, is any open adoption truly ethical as this practice was designed to obtain babies for the market, to keep agencies in business, and to exploit the vulnerability of poor, single, or young mothers?

This, to me, is a most insidious form of coercion.

~ ~ ~

1976 — The Research Begins …

“Recently one of the authors met with a [focus group] of young unwed mothers … the women talked about their struggles, frustration and feelings of bitterness and anger. They regretted their inability to offer their children the kinds of loving care they had expected to give them. Regarding adoption, the women felt that although they were failing to provide adequately, they could not face the possibility of a final and total separation from their infants .. When they were asked about how they would feel about open adoption, thier attititudes were totally different: They thought they could face and even welcome adoption for their children if they could meet the adoptive parents, help in the separation and move ot a new home, and the maintain some contact with the child.” (Baran, Pannor, & Sorosky, 1976, pp. 98-99)

Note: This was the study that started it all: the first research deliberately done to find out how to separate more mothers from their children.” Yngvasson (1997) says about this article:

“[Open adoption] was proposed by Baran and her colleagues as a way of encouraging unmarried women (and specifically unmarried white women) to relinquish their babies for adoption at a time when they were increasingly choosing to raise them alone”

1987 — Studies continue …

“Adoption practices are changing partly in response to the falling relinquishment rate” (Barth, 1987, p. 323). [Note: open adoption being offered to counter-act mothers keeping their babies]

“Taken together, these studies suggest that more vigorous and frequent presentations of adoption options and the possible benefits of relinquishment outweight the possible risks to the practitioner-client relationship.” (Barth, 1987, p. 331)

1990 … a study of 105 white and African-American “keepers” and “releasers” and their mothers, their attitudes toward adoption practices.

“A review of the responses … indicated that the major issue for the adolescent keeper and her mother was the extent to which the birth mother would have information about the baby as it grows up. Thus, there was clear rejection of the idea of not knowing how the baby was doing as it grew up. There was clear support for choosing the actual famiy who gest the baby, for finding out how the baby is doing now and then, for meeting three families and knowng for sure that one of them will get the baby, and for seeing the baby as it grows up …. Movement to a more open procedure, which provides the birth mothers more choice and more information about the fate of her baby might, indeed, increase the consideration of adoption by pregnancy adolescents.” (Kallen et al., 1990, p. 315).

“Of course, the mere availability of open procedures will not be sufficient. Family professionals must take advantage of the opportunity to provide information, guidance, and counselling in support of open adoption.” (Kallen et al., 1990, p. 316).

1991 — Promote it as a way to get more babies to market…

“In a very general way, openness benefits prospective parents because it may increase the pool of adoptable infants. For biological parents to have some continuing knowledge about their relinquished child may help them to choose adoption as an option (Barth, 1987), thus increasing the number of children available and decreasing the wait for an adoptable child.” (Berry, 1991, p. 638)

“Cocozzelli (1989) warns that the potential benefits of open adoption may persuade some adolescent mothers to relinquish a child who would not otherwise have done so. Those mothers who relinquish in the expectation of continued contact may risk prolonged uncertainty and grief.” (Berry, 1991, p. 641)

1999 …

“A ‘confidential’ adoption … may be a factor in the number of young women who choose to keep their babies. … Rather, we must be concerned to the extent that the cost of losing contact with the infant effects a rejection of adoption as a pregnancy outcome.” (Caragata, 1999, p. 116)

“As many young women who choose to place thier baby change their minds following the birth, factors such as having met with the adoptive parents could affect these decisions.” (Caragata, 1999, p. 117)

2005 …

And here is the evidence, in practice, a newspaper article quoting an adoption lawyer (a.k.a. baby broker) who finds this to be a successful way to coerce mothers into surrendering their infants:

” The open adoption process often begins with an adoption attorney. Paul Meding, a Columbia attorney who has been taking adoption cases for 12 years, works as a medium to match birth mothers with adoptive parents. For Meding, this process has been successful. “In my opinion, when the birth mother has more input and can see first hand how important the adoption is to the family, it is more difficult for her to back out and disappoint them.” (“Open Doors,” The Columbia Star, April 29, 2005)

~ ~ ~

References plus related articles:

Purple indicates actual research studies conducted on whether open adoption would work to get more babies surrendered:

  1. Baran, A., Pannor, R., & Sorosky, A. (1976). Open adoption. Social Work, 21, 97-100
  2. Barth, R. (1987). Adolescent Mothers Beliefs about Open Adoption. Social Casework, 68, 323-331
  3. Berry, M. (1991) “The Effects of Open Adoption on biological and Adoptive Parents and the Children: The Arguments and the Evidence”. Child Welfare, 70, 637-51.
  4. Berry, M. (1993). Risks and benefits of open adoption. Adoption, 3(1), 125-138.
  5. Caragata, L. (1999). “The construction of teen parenting and decline of adoption”, in James Wong and David Checkland (eds) Teen Pregnancy and Parenting: Social and Ethical Issues, University of Toronto Press, Ontario: Toronto.
  6. Cocozelli, C. (1989). Predicting the decision of biological mothers to retain or relinquish their babies for adoption: Implications for open placement. Child Welfare, 68, 33-44.
  7. Daly, K. (1994). Adolescent perceptions of adoption: Implications for resolving an unplanned pregnancy. Youth and Society, 25(3), 330-350.
  8. Kallen, D. J., Griffore, R. J., Popovich, S. & Powell, V. (1990). Adolescent mothers and their mothers view adoption. Family Relations, 30, 313-316.
  9. Sobol, M. & Daly, K. (1992). The adoption alternative for pregnant adolescents: Decision making, consequences, and policy implications. Journal of Social Issues, 48(3), 143-161.
  10. Yngvesson, B. (1997). “Negotiating motherhood: Identity and difference in “open” adoptions.” Law and Society Review, 31(1), 31-80.

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Andy and Marcie: An Adoption Story

August 15, 2008

(For those who have been touched by adoption (with a blow-torch), this story is pretty self-evident. For those with no experience or connection to adoption: this is an allegory about adoption, and mothers being convinced by agency workers that if they really loved their babies, they’d surrender them, that adoption is “the loving option,” and how it just does not make sense.)


Andy and Marcie: A Story

Andy met Marcie one afternoon over at Jim’s place. Jim had hosted a barbeque for his friends, and Marcie was the best friend of Jim’s sister Carla. Andy and Marcie immediately hit it off. Both were shy at first, and the conversation stumbled at times, but they laughed and joked together and felt comfortable in one another’s presence. They soon found that they had lots in common. They both loved the same sports (kayaking and hiking), going to hear the local symphony (both were season subscribers), and hated sushi.

After Jim’s party, it was a couple of weeks before either got the nerve to phone the other one up. It was actually Marcie who did, inviting Andy out to the symphony with her that Saturday — there was a special guest conductor in from Chicago. The evening went perfectly, and they went out for chocolate cake and coffee afterwards at the Mocha House Cafe, laughing and talking.

One date led to another, and soon both Andy and Marcie knew that they had never felt so close to another person, so comfortable, so “right.” They both accepted each other’s “faults” with good humour, had lots of fun together with family and friends, and found that not only was there romance but both became good friends. It wasn’t long until they moved in together and discussed commitment.

All seemed very natural, and all their friends were delighted for them. Everyone figured that Andy and Marcie were the perfect pair and would soon get married. In fact, Carla began to drop hints to her friend about being her maid of honour.

Nine months into their relationship though, after many days of joy together, Andy dropped a bombshell. With tears in his eyes, he told Marcie the news. He loved her so much that he had to leave her and he was moving out. Her faced turned white with shock, and she sat down on their couch in total numbness. This was not at all what she was expecting. When through her wracking sobs she asked him why, why she was losing the man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with” He replied with a choking voice that he was not good enough for her and the best thing he could do, the “loving option,” was to allow her to go to another man. No matter what she asked, that is what it came down to: “I am doing this out of love for you.”

As Andy walked out with his suitcase, he told Marcie the name of an intermediary who would pass on messages to him from her. He said that he still loved her and always would. But, he was firm that his counsellor said he had to “move on with his life” and “act like he had never met her.”

Marcie sat back. Did it make sense to love someone so much you had to leave them? When you could have spent your life together and everything was going so well? It was obvious to her: Andy did not love her at all, and this was just an excuse. Unloved, unwanted, she sat back in the apartment that felt so empty, and she cried.

Copyright 2008.  Contact the author for permission to reprint.

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