I have had a difficult time wrapping my mind around my birth mother's mindset. I have been told that she looked at giving us up as "getting rid of us" much as one would get rid of a cold, and with about as much emotion. As a mother myself, I cannot fathom carrying a child for nine months, handing he or she over to strangers and not having any emotional problem with it. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 16 weeks, I was 19 and unmarried and no longer in contact with the father. I grieved the loss of that child as I would have grieved the loss of any child. When I became pregnant with my eldest daughter, it was suggested to me to give her up. I could not even think of it. I don't know if it was due to the feelings I had that this would be my first blood relative that I would know (I had met Wanda by this point but had yet to prove she was in fact my sister) or if it had to do with my feelings both tapped and untapped of being adopted myself. With her first cry I was lost in her and continue to be to this day. I had two more lost pregnancies between her and her brother each equally devastating as the first. My grief compounded with each loss. With each loss, the idea of willingly giving a child away seemed more and more absurd to me. This is not to say that some first mothers are as selfish as my own was. Some have very good reasons, and they grieve as much as any woman would who loses a child. For them I feel sorry, for some are as much victims of the adoption process as their relinquished children are. I see my birth father as a victim. He had no say in whether I stayed or went. My birth mother informed him after my birth that she had a boy and she got rid of it. Maybe she told him I was a boy to throw him off searching for me, we may never know.