![]() His arms were around me, ‘It’s okay baby. ‘I’m afraid to see him because I’m afraid I won’t know him.’ I was sobbing into Tim’s shoulder the week before the visit. A little over a week ago I went to visit with them for the second time in their home with my boyfriend. Wilder is going to be two years old in June. Courtesy of Kaitlyn Buhrman Courtesy of Kaitlyn Buhrman There are also-more often now-days when I’m reminded constantly why I made the choice I made. There are days when I can’t get out of bed, when missing him is like drowning but not ever truly blacking out. It’s been over a year and a half since he left my body and sometimes I still feel him, fluttering in my center. I wish I could say I’m steadfast in my decision, that I never have any regrets about it. When he did start to make noises, they weren’t cries, more like a chirping. I could feel their worry, the nurses, my mother, my best friend, but I wasn’t worried. My head fell back, I bore down, and he was born. The only thing I remember clearly is opening my eyes to look down when the doctor told me to ease up, and seeing my son half-entered the world, half-still part of me. He came a week early, 39 hours of labor, and only 1 pushing. I felt strong in some ways and incredibly tender in others. I started to feel a sense of worth and pride I’d never known before. My son was growing strong and healthy in my belly. It’d been a long winter alone in that apartment, but I’d come through it. I moved home from the city to my mother’s house, for comfort and to be around family. The final month of my pregnancy is when I truly allowed myself to love him. Then he was Wilder, and nothing else mattered. I was terrified of my body, of the small life inside of it. The only thing that kept me from it was the same reason I felt hopeless. I started having thoughts taking off my seatbelt and driving my car into traffic, or into a tree. ![]() I had struggled with depression before in life, but it was getting dark in a way I wasn’t familiar with. My loneliness was crippling, I didn’t know anyone in the city and I didn’t know how to meet people without drinking. Even a pane of stained glass in the tiny window above the radiator. It had exposed brick, built-in bookshelves in the bedroom, a bay window with a bench, and best of all, a deep bathtub. I lived in a beautiful, two-room apartment in west Philly. I spent much of my second trimester wanting to die. I also knew I could find a family who would love my child the way I was loved, it didn’t matter that we weren’t biological family. I knew I wasn’t ready to do it on my own. It feels like it’s in our blood in a weird way, this letting go. I was adopted as an infant, and I learned when I finally met my birth mother at 18 that she was adopted at birth as well. It was a few weeks still before I decided on adoption, but the decision came quickly to me once the idea bloomed. ![]() I didn’t want to have a baby, but something about that amount of time already having passed changed something in me. My gyno told me by the time I took the at-home test I was already two months along. It couldn’t be like it never happened, but this was a way out. I wanted an abortion and he agreed to help pay for it. That was the moment I knew we weren’t going to raise this baby. Show our kid the world was definitely in there. We can show our kid the world.’ I wish I remembered exactly what he said-I was rage-deaf by that point-but it was something like that. I didn’t mind that so much, but the realization he had, and was now trying to explain to me, made my blood burn in my veins. I told him immediately, and his response was to go to the mountains and eat mushrooms about it. It’s three days after I found out I got knocked up by the first guy I ever met from Tinder. I’m sitting on my bed, in my teenage bedroom, at my mother’s house. ‘Oh really? Because my biggest concern is raising a healthy human being.’ “‘My biggest fear is falling into the traps of normalcy,’ he said, stone serious.
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