“Kathy and Tom kept their promises. They brought Aden over to meet my friends. They came to my graduation. They even came over before prom when we dressed up and posed for pictures. In the fall I went off to college, and I wasn’t very involved after that. I tried to see Aden a couple times a year. But I was still a child myself, and I didn’t feel like there was much I could contribute. I needed more time. I needed more space. But Kathy always held a spot for me. Even when I cancelled plans, there wasn’t an ounce of shame. Instead she’d go out of her way to show concern. She’d send text after text: ‘You’re beautiful. You’re good enough. I love you.’ I was made to feel that if I disappeared for twenty years, the door would still be open for me when I came back. It made me trust her so much. And she trusted me as well. We’d confide in each other. Kathy and Tom didn’t have a perfect marriage. It seemed perfect in their adoption profile of course, but they were going through messed up stuff like everyone else. And she never tried to hide that from me. She never needed to seem perfect. And by being so open with her flaws, it allowed me to be more comfortable with my own. Kathy raised our son into the strongest, most intelligent, most humble young man. But she helped raise me too. So much of my self-worth is because of her. I now have three children of my own, and motherhood has caused a lot of emotions to surface. I’ve been confronting painful things that I buried long ago: all the sadness, and all the grief, for what I’d given up with Aden. But I’m so lucky, because I can talk with Kathy about it. We can sit down together, and I can tell her that I sometimes regret the adoption. It’s not that I don’t love her. And I’m not saying that it wasn’t right—I’m only saying that I sometimes regret it. I’m always so careful with my words, because I don’t want to hurt her feelings. But Kathy never gets defensive. She never makes it about her. She never says: ‘If you hadn’t made the decision, I wouldn’t have my son.’ She mainly just listens. And then she tells me how thankful she is. Not for what I gave her. Not for the baby. She says: ‘Missy, I’m so thankful for you.’”
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