What's the Use of Regret?

                                                                                        Photo by Ken Robbins

Regret is a concept, a feeling, that we first mothers deal with one way or another once we give up our babies to the unknown--or sometimes to the known--parents. We mourn, but unless we end up mad we eventually find a way to get on with our lives. My life after relinquishment included the career I always wanted, but I recognize that it came at a great cost that was unexpected and in fact, changed the course of my life. The cost was not only to my damaged psyche and altered prospects, but to my daughter's also. She would be born already fragile, subject to seizures, and so she was handed the double-barreled whammy of epilepsy as well as the sense of abandonment that being given up instills.

Lorraine

So regret. Of course I regret. I regret that I did not find a way to keep her, but I also know looking back that I felt was in an impossible situation. My financial resources were nil, my parents were in no position to help me, and I did not feel I could burden them now with a child. My father died when my daughter was two, and never knew of her existence. I found my daughter when she was 15 but that did not assuage the sense of regret--mine and hers--even though she was with ostensibly a good family and had a pleasant middle-class life.

Who I did not marry....that led to my daughter's birth

But as regular readers know, she really didn't have a pleasant life. The conflict that adoption breeds never left her. But life is a series of unfolding decisions, one after another, and so I examine what happened before that led to her birth at a time when I was not strong enough to find a path to raise her. If one even existed.

While I have been mulling over these thoughts two things crossed my path. An essay in the Sunday in The New York Times a few weeks ago titled the same as this blog post, "What's the Use of Regret?," and while the author Gordon Marino never came to any huge conclusion to this conundrum, the piece did contain this nugget that stuck with me:

"Kierkegaard observed that you don’t change God when you pray, you change yourself. Perhaps it is the same with regret. I can’t rewind and expunge my past actions, but perhaps I change who I am in my act of remorse."

Perhaps that is why I began writing about adoption. Because I felt that if I had this tragedy in my life, and with the knowledge that I was not alone in this tragedy, I could find solace in helping others recognize that we are not alone in our grief, a grief shared worldwide with other mothers everywhere. 

At the same time these thoughts were filling my mind, one of our frequent commentators, Kaisa Gwendolyn, wrote about a holiday in Brazil that gives everyone a day to commiserate what they have lost and long for in the lives. Kaisa wrote: "Saudades is a day to mourn what never was. My husband and I tried to get pregnant in earnest for 9 years, and finally after the final failure one November we hit a deep depression that holiday season...."

Daughter and mother reunited, 1982

Several people commented about the concept of Saudades because the idea struck home in so many of us: a day to actually mourn our losses, of what never was, of what never will be. It's not a way to a quick fix, or some psychological wall paper to cover over our sorrows, but a day to accept and understand our grief. It is a day to mourn. 

Mothers who relinquish their children generally are not given licence to have that time in their own families at the very moment the child is lost, when every fiber of our being is urging us to keep our child close, to love and protect and nourish. Some of the saddest comments are from the women who were told by their parents to stop their sniveling and "put on their big girl panties" and shut up. We're not supposed to wear black, cry in public, carry on at family gatherings, or raise a glass in a toast that we miss them years later. In some families, we are not even supposed to acknowledge their very existence. Ever. 

A quick Google search for the holiday itself didn't turn up anything about the holiday, but instead about a place, Saudades do Iguacu in Brazil, and limited hotel accommodations, as well as steak houses of named Saudades. I did find these further definitions of the word that Kaisa described so well: 

"Perhaps my favorite of these elusive words is saudade, a Portuguese and Galician term that is a common fixture in the literature and music of Brazil, Portugal, Cape Verde and beyond. The concept has many definitions, including a melancholy nostalgia for something that perhaps has not even happened. It often carries an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again. My favorite definition of saudade is by Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo: "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy."--alt.Latino

I'm not sure about the "enjoy" part for myself, but letting myself think back to the marriage that was not that preceded my relationship (above photo of Tom) with my daughter's father is melancholy and I understand the "enjoyment" about both the sweet remembrances of our times together, and the loss of what did not happen, in my mind's wanderings. We met on Thanksgiving Day at my cousin's wedding, and thoughts of that usually come fleeting through my mind at some point on the day.

And from a blog called Expat Since Birth: 

“A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived.”

Perhaps we mothers and adoptees too ought to observe this kind of thinking, for it would allow us to recognize and accept the sadness that enfolded our lives. It might be a way to find a new way of thinking about our fate. We have had a hard cross to accept in our lives but others have had different crosses and just as difficult to bear: the loss of a parent at an early age, the bombing that is destroying lives in the Middle East, the ravages of war that return broken bodies, broken minds. We can't go about crying Me Me Me, My pain is worse that yours, but we can acknowledge to ourselves, and perhaps to those closest to us, that we suffer still. And that we do go on.--lorraine

______________________________

SOURCES

What's the Use of Regret?
Is "saudade" really untranslatable? 
Saudade: An Untranslatable, Undeniably Potent Word

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ALSO FROM FMF

How giving up a child affects you in the long-term

Is giving up a child for adoption a 'loving' decision?

When I had my first child, I regret not asking my mother for help

TO READ

The Quotable Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard

Edited by Gerald Marino

An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love
By Caitrionia Palmer

5.0 out of 5 starsA Touching Story

ByAnne Biggson July 18, 2016

Format: Kindle Edition

Such an amazing piece of writing. Having been in her shoes as well, facing the sadness of being someone's 
secret is often unbearable. She told her story without judgment and with great love for a difficult situation. This
book is a stepping stone for those facing the same experience. Beautifully written memoir. A must read for anyone
 with two families, or those who know someone who has two families and to better understand their feeling.