I helped my daughter abandon her newborn baby.
A Mother’s Rejection
My daughter signed away her baby, so we raised him as our own. Twenty-five years later, she showed up to extort us for money. When my daughter Mildred was 18, she got me a gift. It was a pregnancy stick with two pink lines. I sighed. She had always been more on the careless side, the type to never think things through.
I couldn’t even get a word in before she started hollering,
“And I’m not getting a baby termination. So, y’all better step up.”
For context, by “y’all,” she meant me and her father. By “step up,” she meant dedicating our lives to raising her baby for her.
Well, me and my husband love babies and always wanted to have more children. So, we agreed pretty quickly. Soon Mildred was practically shoving forms in our face. She insisted on signing away her parental rights because she didn’t want any responsibility in case my grandparents ran into money problems. As if she had any money to give.
Anyway, Philip ended up being an amazing son. He was curious and kind, never asked without saying please, always offering to help my husband with his work. Unfortunately, he was an accountant and could never take him up on the offer. But the gesture was unbelievably wholesome.
When he turned 10, he started asking about his bio mom, our daughter. It was clear he wanted a relationship with her. Every Mother’s Day, he’d write two cards and had a stack of envelopes labeled “to mommy” in a box under his bed. Plus, he tried to contact her and asked for a meeting over 12 times when he turned 11 years old.
Me and my husband always tried to distract him from this, to reassure him that we loved him as our own. But it wasn’t until the 13th time our daughter shut him down that he finally gave up and started living his own life.
I did everything I could to make him feel welcomed into our home. Me and my husband both gave up our savings so he could go to college without getting a part-time job. We made sure that he went on holiday at least once a year with just one of us tagging along with him.
By the time he was 22, it seemed like he had forgotten all about his mother. She was still talking to us, but never asked about me or tried to have a mother-son relationship. I was always extremely grateful for this. By this point, I loved Philip more than I could ever love Mildred. She purposely kept us from her life too.
She had us blocked on every social media platform including WhatsApp. All I knew was that she had married someone new across the country. Good riddance.
My son ended up dropping out of college because he and his friends had started a car cleaning business. His marketing was so good that business soared. He always gave me and my husband 15% of all his earnings to thank us for being so amazing.
There was just one thing I hated about him. He was dead set on paying us back so we could experience what we missed while raising him. It ticked me off a lot because I never wanted him to feel like that. We enjoyed raising him more than we would have enjoyed doing anything else. A year later, he met the love of his life, Amber, and she was a sweetheart.
